


Persistence of Worth

by Winterstar



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Body Horror, Child of Thanos, Hurt Steve Rogers, M/M, Medical Procedures, Out of Character, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Protective Thor (Marvel), Rape/Non-con Elements, Redemption, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Thundershield - Freeform, Torture, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-27
Updated: 2019-07-12
Packaged: 2019-10-17 19:34:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 33,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17566658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Winterstar/pseuds/Winterstar
Summary: He is known as the Commander of the Black Order, the scourge upon the galaxy and the Nine Realms. His legend extends to the farthest reaches. Some say he is merciful, the only one of the Order to stay the hand of the mad Titan. Some say he's brutal, a true heir to Thanos. Once he was known as Steve Rogers, Captain America. Now he is known as a Child of Thanos.Who is he?Along with his step sisters, Steve Rogers suffers the torment of Thanos...and hopes to find his worth someday listening to his mother's words, to always stand up. He knows it is hopeless until one day, an invasion brings him face to face with a true demigod, Thor of Asgard. Is this god among men his savior or is he Steve's doom?





	1. Before

**Author's Note:**

> Lots to unpack for this story. It was originally an idea that was floated to me on tumblr by an anon based on a post I reblogged ([post](https://winterstar95.tumblr.com/post/182296139430/ellidfics-bisteverogers-anthony-russo-i) ). I thought about it and said there's no way. And then thegraytigress and I started to chat about it. Suddenly I had abducted Steve from Earth when he's only 8 with the Mad Titan determined to use Steve as his tool in the galaxy. Why Steve - well, you'll see in the coming chapters. 
> 
> Because of the nature of this story, it is brutal. Thanos is by nature pitiless and evil. I paint him that way throughout. I have also decided that both Gamora and Nebula belong to alien species with long lives. It works better that way for the story. I've also made some suppositions about the Outriders, and the Black Order. These may not line up with everything we know (or don't really know) about them in the MCU. 
> 
> The first chapter really focuses on Steve, but Thor will appear. And very soon the story will revolve around both of them.

The room aches with cold. A cold meant to eat into the hollow of his bones. How many times over the long years did he spend in his room, did he fear this room? In the darkness surrounding him, he glimpses the shift of time. He sees the boy he was, stolen away from his mother, long lost on Earth, and brought to the arms of a monster, a Titan, to begin his journey as one of the chosen, one of the children of Thanos. 

In the early days when he would lie awake crying for his mother, trying to remember her face and her soft and gentle touch, one of the others – a girl – beautiful and bright would come to him in his room. She wouldn’t say a word to him but would simply put her green hand on his and hold it. He found comfort in her touch. Later, he discovered she was one of the two daughters of Thanos. The monster groomed her to be his killer, his pride and joy. When the Titan looked at the girl something akin to love shone in his eyes. Now, he knows it wasn’t love, but some kind of mutated emotion that masqueraded as love. Though when he was younger, just a boy, he realized the only way to survive the hell was to chase that dream. The dream of having the great Titan gaze at him, at Steve, that way.

He never did.

Steve disappointed him at every turn. He grew up weak and thin. A reed of a boy, so small that a simple swat of the monster’s hand flung Steve across the room, smashing into the wall so that he lost consciousness. He would wake up bleary eyed and nauseated, but the green girl was there to wipe his brow and apologize for her ‘father’s’ savagery. 

“Please try harder,” she said in her smallest voice.

Steve nodded and touched the tears on her cheeks. She let him. When she cleaned his head wound, she was as soft and caring as his mother. After she left his little cell, he stared into the middle distance and remembered the face of his mother. The line of her cheek. The color of her eyes. 

As he hangs suspended by the forcefield, Steve can no longer picture her. She’s obscure like the gases of a nebula, a ghost of his memories. He wants to see her again. But he knows she’s done his bidding, become his assassin because she had no choice. None of them did, not as children of Thanos.

It didn’t matter. Monsters haunt the nightmares of children. Steve lived the nightmare. Every day. Thanos showed no pity on a sickly boy. If it hadn’t been for Gamora, the little green girl, Steve probably would have died. She called him her little brother and nursed him to health time and again. When his lungs seized and he spat up blood, she begged for medicine from her father. The monster acquiesced and gave the medicine. He wouldn’t allow Gamora to move Steve out of the cells into a more comfortable, heated room. He was, after all, a disappointment. 

When he shrank away from Thanos during his lessons to be a Commander for the Children of Thanos, Gamora implored her father to take pity on him. After all, he was a pathetic human. 

“You must try harder,” Gamora whispered to him after the lessons were cut short because of Steve’s breathing problems. 

“I don’t want to be here. I want to go home,” Steve wept. The dank place he slept in only made the fevers worse. The cell with its walls of stone and ceiling so high that Steve had a hard time seeing it with the tiny light bulb at his bed side ensured his health would never get better.

Gamora gave him medicine with a dropper. He accepted the bitter concoction on his tongue. It tasted like sulfur. “He’ll do to you what he does to Nebula. Please, you must try harder.”  
The name Nebula became a harbinger for Steve. Infrequently, he saw the girl as she turned into a woman or a robot or something else entirely. Thanos, the monster of Steve’s nightmares, would pit his two adopted daughters against one another in some brutal macabre game. At first, the tasks were simple things, but then they grew more brutish, more ghoulish as the sisters matured. The first time Nebula lost a challenge and Thanos replaced a part of her body with a cyborg implant her screams echoed through the fortress of days. Steve huddled in his cell and hoped to die before any of that happened to him.

He didn’t die, though.

And everything happened to him.

When the Black Order entered his cell, telling him their great father, Thanos, had great plans for him, Steve fought against them. His pitiful strength measured nothing against them. They dragged him out of the cell, laughing the entire time. The one, Proxima Midnight, suggested that if he behaved then she might take except to his measly size and ugly face. She might adopt him, tend to him, and keep him as her pet. He bit her in return. She smacked him across the face until his head rang. 

Without any mercy, they brought him to a lab. He shivered and thought of Nebula. He was a older then no longer a child, but still weak, still not at all what Thanos hoped he would be. They started the experiments. Steve added Ebony Maw to the list of monsters that lurked in the night. Maw reported to Thanos.

“He needs only some pain, my most honored lord. The pain will toughen him.”

Thanos stared at Steve, strapped to the table with his pale, thin chest. “Do what you can. If it doesn’t work, he will be fodder for the beasts. There are those who should not trouble the universe with their ills.”

Steve cried not for himself or for his mother. He kept his eyes dry and his mind numb as Maw worked on his weak body. His mind grew stronger, and he might now think that it was a curse to possess such willpower to endure. If he had faltered or failed during the trials Maw put him through, then maybe he would have been spared. Or he would have been granted death. 

The memories still plague him even as he hangs from the ceiling in Thanos’ special room. Here his body is dissembled and stretched until his eyes feel as if there will never be anymore tears, until his ligaments pop and his muscles shred. Here, he shudders against his bonds but still he finds a way to remain loyal to the fading memory of his mother from so long ago. It has been years since he last saw her, held her, kissed her rosy red cheek. 

He is a man now. 

A Commander in the Black Order.

He is fallen. 

He wonders still if he deserved the gifts that the old man Erskine bestowed upon him so many decades ago. When Maw’s work failed and Thanos raged, Gamora saved him. She brought a man from Earth, dropped him at the feet of her step father and told him, “He can save your project.”

Steve was that project. 

Thanos scoffed at her. “If Maw cannot do it, how can this feeble minded human save my project?”

Gamora smirked. She was young then, full of fire and hatred. “Maw is an ass. He knows nothing of humans. This one is from their world. He knows more than you can imagine. He’ll save your project.”

“Your heart is too soft. Perhaps I should trust in Nebula more than you,” Thanos had said and then gave his two daughters another task, another game to win while he turned his attention to the Earth scientist. “You have one chance to change this weakling into my champion.”

Erskine did the impossible. 

Steve asked him not to do it, to fail. “Please, I don’t want this. I don’t want to be his right hand. I don’t want to lay down his justice. He wants a Commander. All I want is to go home.”

The night before the experiment, Erskine had visited him in his cold dark cell with it’s high walls and chilled air. “You have the mark of a good man, Steven. Perhaps, you are right. Perhaps I shouldn’t give you this serum. But perhaps I should because you are the only one who could stop this madman.” 

Steve shook his head. “Stop him? No one can stop him. He wants the universe to fold under his hand. He wants to kill half of all living things to balance the universe. He wants me to find his precious infinity stone, that was hidden on Earth eons ago.” He curled in on himself, holding his knees to his chest. “I just want to go home and see my mother again. It’s been so long.”

“How long have you been here?”

“I was eight when he took me. What year was it when he took you?” Steve asked, fearing the answer.

“It was 1943.”

Steve sank onto his cot. He was 25. He’d been prisoner for 17 years. “Doesn’t matter.” His voice hollowed out his chest, dug holes in his soul. “She probably forgot me.”

“No mother forgets their child,” Erskine said. “You will survive. You have the heart of a good man.”

“How do you know?” Steve shivered in the cold. They didn’t give him a blanket. 

“Because you want to do good. You don’t long for the power.” Erskine patted his knee then and stood up. “They’re coming back for me soon. I’ll see you tomorrow. Don’t lose faith.”

Steve held the words close to his chest. Thought of all the ways the serum might help him. If Erskine was correct and the serum worked, then Thanos would drop him back onto Earth to find the space stone. The singular thought became his beacon of hope that one day he would seek out his mother again and be home. It was Erskine again who changed it.

He held onto Steve’s arm as they prepared him for the serum, as Maw tapped his large fingers and snickered in the background of the cavernous laboratory. Erskine looked down onto Steve on the cold metal table. He whispered, “You may become his Commander today. You may be at his beck and call. But remember you are the Earth’s hope to defeat him. Remember you are the Earth’s Captain.”

Steve shivered in the straps as the table began to rise. The pod encapsulated him, and the needles pierced his skin. The blue serum surged into his major muscle groups and the radiation enhanced the reaction. He screamed like Nebula cried out. He felt the hot tears on his cheeks. His blood turned to lava scorching him from the inside out. His skin rebelled and he thought his brain might fry. Every fiber stretched beyond its limits, every nerve sang out in perfect pain. He seized within the pod, though it was nothing like Maw’s torture. 

He heard Erskine begging for them to stop. He couldn’t get his breath out to tell him it was okay. He could do it, he could change into a monster to stop the mad Titan. With every moment of the transformation the pain heightened, and his resolve solidified. He would find a way to get his revenge and stop the alien. If Erskine stopped it, then Thanos would feed him to the beasts, the hordes awaiting to do his duty. 

“No! No! I can do this!” His breath finally filled lungs and he yelled to the laboratory outside the pod. 

Still Erskine cried for him and he heard the ghoulish laughter of Maw. Soon though, the chamber filled with Steve’s own battle to stifle his groans of pain, his sobs for mercy. He heard nothing outside the pod until the reaction stopped and the new muscles in his body quaked with the need to move and to run. The pod opened and he beheld the world anew. The dark laboratory that had looked so bleak with its gray and white mixed with black now had garnish colors – later he would learn they were gold and purple. The smells filled his noise and he coughed in disgust. 

Yet all of this faded with the sight of Erskine laying akimbo, his neck broke and his arms above his head like some fiendish clown. Blood dripped out of his mouth, painted his lips. Steve blinked away the tears, stood up straight and proud and said, “I am ready to serve my honored father.”

Maw smiled and ran his long fingers over Steve’s naked chest, lingering and possessing.

Thanos had watched him, observed from the center of the room, his eyes small like pinpoints of ice. Later he would instruct Nebula and Gamora to test Steve – to test his new Commander.

“Find out what his,” Thanos said with a sneer, “limitations are.”

Strangely, it had been Nebula who understood. Gamora had long ago sacrificed her peace of mind and her soul to survive. Within Gamora there existed a part of her still curled in a corner, mourning her mother and her planet. Yet as they grew into adults, Gamora shielded herself with walls of the strongest construction. No one could penetrate them, not even Steve anymore. While Nebula seethed in her hate for her step father, Gamora played the game and hated herself even more. 

On their first mission together, Nebula sat by him in the transport vehicle. “Don’t try to run. Maw will have you in seconds.”

Steve kept his gaze straight forward as Nebula spoke. Her words were whispered. It was a time when the majority of her body was still her own. She didn’t have the recording devices in artificial eyes. “Follow my lead.”

Steve closed his eyes and opened them slowly. He thought he saw flashes of his soul breaking apart as he sat in the dark. “If they ask me to kill someone, an innocent.”

“Follow my lead.”

It was all she said. When she stood up, she nodded to Steve and left him to contemplate if he really could do a malicious deed. The mission happened. Steve followed Nebula’s lead. He was spared a punishment because Nebula took it for him. He heard her anguished cries and wanted to die, but then he remembered Erskine and his words. Fortified he went to Nebula after, he helped her survive. Thanos took it as an insult. Steve was given to Maw for a fortnight. 

It started a cycle. Tasks, Failure, Punishment, Pain. 

Steve finally broke the cycle after Thanos plucked Nebula’s eye out of her head and she could no longer cry. He remembered his broken sister and made the sacrifice of his own soul to save her. Gamora only smiled in sad and pitiful way. They were all in this horrible cycle together. 

At times, Steve stumbled his way back to his Commander’s room for he no longer was condemned to a cell and crumpled onto the bed. The tears didn’t come. He stared unseeing into the past and wished for death. He wanted to do it himself, but the strength he saw in Nebula and Gamora stopped him. If they could survive the terrible Titan, so could he and maybe somehow he could make amends. 

The Black Order followed him everywhere. Never did he find himself alone. There was no release, no escape. Even with his new found strength they overcame him again and again. Every attempt that failed – and numerous ones did – he ended up back in Maw’s clutches. 

Every time the Black Order called him to do his duty, Steve donned his Commander uniform like a shell, an impervious barrier between him and the rest of existence. During the heat of conquest he used it as his shield, as a way to find safety for as many of the unfortunate souls targeted by the mad Titan as possible. It wasn’t easy staying off the radar of the Black Order especially as he worked and led their ranks. If he couldn’t find escape for himself, surely he could do it for the conquered. 

Thanos found him lacking.

“I don’t know the universe, these planets.” It was a weak excuse, but the one he could use to find his way back home.

“You grew up under my teachings. You should know as much as your sisters!” Thanos yelled. His displeasure throbbed through the fortress, through every soul in the planet. The whole of the world seemed to shrink in his rage. “You are not even fit to be their brother. You are only part of the Order and you are not even a particularly good Child of mine!”

Steve stood his ground. “I accomplished my tasks. Gorgonna has been seized. You can do with it as you will.” 

“You took them alive! You requested their surrender. You won the planet by negotiation. That is not what I asked you to do!” Thanos leaned down and his hot breath had hit Steve in the face like fetid air.

“You asked for Gorgonna to bend to your will. You have a whole planet ready to worship you like a god.” 

“You twist my words,” Thanos said.

“Then I will prove to you, my dear father, that I am your loyal servant. Send me to Earth and I will bring you back the infinity stone you seek.” It had been another play to get back home. A toss of the dice so daring and blatant that it even surprised himself. 

Thanos studied him as if he observed an insect under a magnifying glass. “You test my patience, Commander.”

“I ask to do your will, my father.”

“Then so be it.”

Now, as Steve hangs, suspended in the cell, he thinks about those first moments on Earth, when he smelled the air and felt the gravity. His body ached as if it finally recognized its place in this universe. The first thing he had done when he found himself back on Earth was search for his mother only to find her gone. Dead these many years. He sat by her grave and cried. The rain spattered her headstone with its final words.

 _To my son, Steve, always stand up. Always stand for what you believe._

Had she known what had happened to him? Had she understood that a monster from the sky abducted him and he longed to be with her. So many years had passed, decades and he missed his chance to say goodbye. But she hadn’t. She had these words etched in stone to him. The words were powerful etched for all eternity, speaking through the decades to him. She never gave up hope and so he wouldn’t either. He promised her that day as the rain soaked him. 

Steve managed to slip away from the Black Order, he found a way to join up with the Army and go to war. He was home and he needed to find a way to offer restitution. He turned his skills from his training with the Order into a legend as he fought for the Allies and went to battle with a nightmare of Earth’s making – the Red Skull. He discovered that Red Skull might be his evil twin since Erskine had a hand in creating him. Steve threw himself into the war, became a hero of sorts, knew friendship and love to a degree. It felt like home, yet all the while he knew they were watching. 

The Black Order waited. They did not interfere. Steve suspected it was because the device Red Skull played with like an imbecile, the Tesseract was actually the space stone. So, the Black Order allowed him his time, pretended he had escaped their clutches. Steve only worried on the edges of his consciousness if it was the case. He’d found home again. There was no reason to worry. 

But Thanos had waited decades for him to be ready to come to Earth to find the lost stone, he could easily waited as Steve established himself as a Captain among his men. 

Captain America they had called him.

The Black Order threatened. Steve knew he had no choice but to destroy the Tesseract. He flew a plane into the Arctic waters in hopes that he would sacrifice himself and all knowledge of the Tesseract. Thanos would not have his prize and Steve could go to a watery grave knowing that he had made some sort of amends for his time as a Commander in the Black Order. Yet, even with that, Thanos would not let him rest in peace. 

“You think that you can escape the inevitable,” Thanos says to him now as he hangs in the cold room. Thanos always looks as if he might want to be a priest or a great philosopher but doesn’t have the brains to do it. “None of us can. One day I will be tested, but I will pass. You on the other hand.”

Thanos touches Steve’s face. In the years he’s spent as a prisoner since driving the plane into ocean, Thanos has often ‘worked’ on Steve, trying to perfect him. His bloody assistant and muse, Ebony Maw, has been there to guide Thanos on the intricacies of the bio-nanotechnology.

“I wanted a perfect son. I have you instead. I will fix you as I have fixed my daughter,” Thanos says. 

He repeats this every time he comes into the cell to torture Steve. Every time he replaces parts of Steve with his bionanite technology. Steve knows pain now, knows its bright and true course. When Thanos shredded Steve’s chest and shoulder, crushing his rib cage and pulverizing his shoulder joint, Steve passed out. Soft hands woke him days later as Nebula tended to him, her eyes soft and sorrowful. She rubbed away the blood on his new implants covering the left side of this chest and his left shoulder. He scrambled trying to get away from her, but the pain made him delirious and he vomited all over her and himself. 

She stayed with him all that day and into the night. She gave him teas and ointments. She nursed him when he quaked and seized with the pain. The pain never ended. She told him it would, but he suspected the serum changed him and wouldn’t allow him to be free from it. Gamora came to her sister’s side. 

“You can’t stay here any longer. He’s not our brother anymore,” Gamora cried. “Please.”

“Oh. What do you care?” Nebula snipped and shoved her away. She pushed the door closed and locked it. Turning she faced Steve. “She doesn’t understand. She’ll never understand us.”

At that moment, Steve comprehended what had happened. He’d fallen and Nebula wanted to pick him up to stand with her in hatred and in revenge. Steve had seen his Earth friends die in war, he’d watched them get blown apart. Revenge and anger was something he understood intimately. Yet, his mother’s grave stone haunted him. He would stand up, he would stay the course on what he believed.

He keeps the words close even when Thanos approaches him long after Nebula abandoned him. She left when he denied her the pledge she wanted – where they would kill and become scourges to the worlds of Thanos. Her anger rang out in the cell, but he only listened to the silent words of his mother. And so, Steve is left to Thanos, the madman of a thousand worlds. A Titan set to kill the universe for some perverse need to ensure his own sense of balance. 

“I see you as imbalanced,” Thanos says as stands next to Steve’s suspended body. “I see you as the perfect form but not the perfect mind. I see parts of you missing their needed requirement, their needed balance. A certain gravitas must be sought.”

He flashes a scalpel in front of Steve’s face. The glint of the blade shines in the light of the cell. Steve tries not to react, not to jitter in his bindings as he swings in the forcefield. His chest plate and arm are stretched out – the layers of the tech plates and bones splayed out wide. Each centimeter Thanos lengthens it sends spears of pain through Steve’s body. The serum screeches in protest. His blood boils, his nerves burn. He’s turned inside out like an orange peeled and crushed. 

“It’s time for you to see the world as you should, my child,” Thanos says and the scalpel comes down on his face, pierces through his flesh. Steve bites away the scream on his lips until he tastes blood.

Thanos’ carves down the middle of his forehead, down the bridge of his nose to the corner of his eye and then across his cheek bone. A thousand spikes from Maw’s malevolent interrogations couldn’t feel as wretched. Thanos, with such large fingers, is surprisingly deft at his work. He peels back Steve’s skin, pulls at the muscles as blood plinks on the floor tiles. Steve judders in his bonds.

“Don’t move, my child. Any movement and I might slip.” The skin falls away, flayed from the muscle groups underneath and the pain burst in his sinuses. His nose drips and his tear ducts water. “Now we’ll take care of that. This will hurt. Much more than you’ve ever known, but soon you will understand how to serve me. Soon you will see the benefit of service.” 

The blade strikes his eye socket. The blade slices his eye ball. 

Screams encompass him. Nothing else exists. 

He struggles and tries to swing away, but Thanos commands the bonds to freeze and they do. He’s trapped like a bug on a paper. 

“You have such beautiful eyes. And now I will have this one as my treasure.”

Steve grits his teeth as the dagger digs deeper as the pain swirls around him like a tornado. It brings with it a dizzying nausea. His stomach roils and he gags on the blood in his mouth. Everything tastes like metal and the pain whirls higher and higher as if his whole body lifts spinning up into the air. But the air is on fire and his brain melts. He cries out in a horrible sob before oblivion finally takes him. 

When he wakes from his gray dreams he can still see out of both eyes – but the one eye feeds back to him. Information in a stream, the temperature of the room, the dimension of the room, his heart rate, the potential for infection, and codes file passed. He’s lost his one eye to this thing. He’s become not a human but a creature. Something odd and off. 

Part of him is glad his mother is dead. He would be a nightmare, a monster to her now. 

“Don’t cry,” Gamora says as she steps out of the shadows of the room. He’s still hanging, suspended. His eyeball is not in his socket – it’s stretch out in some ghastly three dimensional puzzle of his face. The eyeball turns to see her. 

“Wha- what do. What do you want,” Steve says and he can barely hear himself. How much more of his body did Thanos remove and replace with his evil bio-nanotechnology. 

Gamora cups his face, his human side. “I’m so sorry. I’ll kill him myself.”

“No.”

Gamora doesn’t reply she goes over to the console and switches some of the display. His body parts shift and click back into place. He counts them. A shoulder, a forearm, chest, his upper face, his eye. “Is that better? Does it hurt as much?”

He long suspects that she knows the serum doesn’t allow the pain to go away completely. “It’s better.”

“He’ll take more when he comes back,” Gamora says. “He’s gone to conquer more worlds. Testing Nebula.” 

“Not you?” Steve asks and then clenches his teeth as the pain throbs through his skull. 

“Not this time,” she answers. “I’m planning on leaving. I would take you with me.”

“But you won’t.”

“I can’t. They have Cull guarding you. As soon as I’m able, I’ll get help.” Streaks of tears line her face. “Promise me you’ll survive. Promise me you’ll be here when I get back?”

“I promise,” he says and knows his lying. The pain isn’t a boulder to push up a mountain, it’s not a chore to face and to defeat, but it is like flying too close to the sun only to fall back to Earth and death. There’s no way out of it, the land will surely end him. The land will surely come, and the pain will always win. 

“Promise me you’ll do whatever it takes,” Gamora says. She’s asking him to acquiesce to Thanos. To do his bidding and kill innocents. He can’t do that, not now, not ever. Not again. He made a vow on the grave of his mother. He won’t lie to her about this. 

“I can’t.”

She holds his face with her hand and touches her forehead to his. The artificial part, the nanite part registers the heat of her skin and displays it in his visual field. “Don’t leave me, my brother. Please. I already lost my sister.”

Can he lie again like he did after the serum injections? Can he tell Thanos he’s ready to be one of his legion? To follow in his way? To be a disciple of his beliefs? 

“He’ll never believe me anyway.” 

“He’ll believe me,” Gamora offers and Steve shakes his head.

“Don’t.” He can’t forbid her. She has her own free will, but in the end, she listens to him. 

Thanos convicts him and sentences him to decades of hard labor. He will work along with the horde, the Outriders. Thanos shoves him into their stalls and states, “You will learn humility. You will learn how to be cruel to survive, my son. This universe does not suffer the kind and generous. It only allows the strongest and most powerful to survive.”

When Thanos tells him he’ll live along with the Outriders for the next century, Steve laughs. He will either be dead inside a day or he will be dead long before a century. Obviously, Thanos knows nothing about human physiology. Or maybe he does.

Steve survives.

For decades.

What he suffers at the hands of the Outriders he keeps hidden away in the deepest recesses of his mind. Their torture, their brutality, their mindless need for blood causes Steve to live a life of numb resistance. He persists only as a figment, a ghost in front of his mother’s grave. He relives every moment on Earth within the stalls of the Outriders. He ignores the read out of his mechanical eye as it tells him exactly what horror his body suffers at their devilish hands. The Outrider beasts hunger for him, their nails scrape, their hands violate, their teeth gnaw and gnash. Every few months, Maw drags him out of the barns and pastures where the horde lives and delivers him back into the hands of Thanos.

Gamora no longer visits him and he wonders if she’s found a way to escape Thanos’ influence. Nebula is there, or what’s left of her. Thanos hangs Steve from the forcefield bindings again and commits more atrocities. He separates skin and muscle from femur only to replace it with his hideous technology. Thanos speaks but forbids Steve’s from talking. 

“I’ve devoted my life to my children, to making this a better universe, a better reality for you. And how do you repay me? You lose the Tesseract, you let it drop into the ocean.”

Steve does not ask why Thanos, who believes himself to be all powerful, cannot just pluck it from the depths of a sea. A madman like Thanos is so self-possessed and deluded that he can rationalize it away. 

“I need you as my son. My daughters are stronger than you. I have no intention of failing with you. I may be disgusted with Nebula, but she has the soul of a warrior and the rage to match. You are nothing but the weak man you were before I gave you the gift of this body.”

Suspended and stretched, Steve keeps the truth to himself. Erskine gave him life, gave him strength and power, not Thanos. Erskine gave him purpose. His mother gave him a reason to continue to fight. Thanos gave him nothing. 

As the madman plucks another ligament free and tears from Steve’s one natural eye drip down his face – the pain so bad that he’s gone numb with it – Thanos says, “This time, once I am finished, I think we will give you the gift that you so longed for that you lost the Tesseract.”

Steve bites back a cry of pain as his heart races to match his dizzy mind. Thanos plans to finally kill him, to do away with him. Yet, why does he continue to fiddle with Steve, implanting a nanites within his leg to fashion new muscles and skin. Steve realizes the truth; he is only a lab rat after all. Whatever Thanos learns from these insane experiments will be used to further Thanos’ grand plan. Steve quavers as Thanos finishes – but he’s not sure it is from fear of the unknown, or the pain.

“Now,” Thanos says and steps back as if to admire his work. He tilts his head, surveying the monstrosity that he’s turned Steve’s body. “Now I will have you frozen, and we will see how you survive, if you do.”

Ebony Maw enters the room as Thanos leaves. He gives a cast off wave and Maw goes to the panel, stretching every one of the implants out until Steve’s screams are only hiccups of sound. When the air can no longer fill his lungs, Maw finally relents and shifts the console so that all of the mechanical plates fall back into place. Steve pants through the pain. Blood drips from his left nostril. The eye and cheek implant never truly worked well.

“Now, we will preserve our glorious father’s work.” 

Steve does his best to struggle, to fight, but his muscles are weak from the stretching, and the implant procedures. His movements are uncoordinated, and he flails around when they release him like a turtle on its back. Cull slams him hard into the wall to stop him from grappling and resisting. It works too easily because of how weak Steve is. Living with the beasts for so long, Steve is near starvation. 

They haul him to the coldest portion of the fortress where they stock the meats for the Outrider beasts. Taking his wrists they hang him from a hook like the other sides of meat in the freezer. Cull locks him in place under the direction of Maw. His feet are tied down and hooked to the floor. He has no shirt or pants on. Only the small underwear Thanos permitted him. The cold immediately takes hold when they leave him in the pitch dark room. 

It smells of frost and metal. He shivers but knows his body is fighting a losing battle. He tried to crack the wrist bindings, but his muscles haven’t adjusted yet from the stretching and torture. It usually takes the serum a few hours to right the wrongs of the expansion room. His breath comes out in panicked puffs, his lips quiver. His whole body jolts against the bonds as he gets colder and colder still. Until at last a heat comes over him. It starts inside and flushes outward, it’s the end. He blinks slowly. His artificial eye reports his lowering body temperature, warns of possible frostbite. He laughs in spite of himself. 

He’s frozen in only a few hours. Unfortunately, Steve remains awake and aware for most of the weeks he’s in the freezer. His eye counts the days. His mind slowly swirls in circles of ever increasing diameter around a central point of his survival. He relives his short time on Earth. Was it only 2 years in the war? He should have ran. He should have found a way to escape. Yet he stayed and joined the war to make amends and to get to the Tesseract before his man step father could find it. 

Frozen but aware, Steve replays the memories again and again. He ignores his ever-present eye. By the time Maw enters the room and directs Cull to remove him from the hook, a decade has past. 

They thaw him slowly and with care. It surprises Steve. He laughs inwardly but recalls his mother’s voice from the grave. His mind whizzes and jerks. When Maw tries to get him to respond, Steve has forgotten how to talk. Mute, Steve only stares at nothing. 

“Give him pain. It will wake him up.” It is his step father who commands it.

They put him in the laboratory again and expand the implants. He remembers how to scream. It is Nebula who comes to him this time. Her eyes are mote of rage and hellish anger. She talks to him about her home planet, about what little she remembers from before she was Thanos’ daughter. There’s a small smile when she recalls her mother. By the time she’s done – it might be days or weeks or even months, Steve has forgotten to care about time because now he knows it doesn’t move the right way anymore – he talks again. His mind settles again.

Thanos commands Maw to dump him in with the Outrider beasts again. A new pattern develops. A pattern that kills off the shreds of hope and purpose Steve holds in his heart. Weeks or months with the Outrider beasts, scratching to survive against the odds. Followed by a week with the insanity of a Titan gone mad. And then at last he’s released into the freezer again. For years. 

“It will toughen you, my son. Each time your hold on your weak self grows thinner and thinner. Each time, I see that you climb out of the pity of despair with a more focused view on your savior, myself. Over the course of a century, you will be transformed into my most perfect child.”

Steve wants to deny him. He cannot. He’s strung up again. His artificial femur was broken by the Outriders and now Thanos has replaced it. It aches as the nanites regrow. Thanos is working on his left hand, replacing digits with the implants. Each and every cut of fibers, bones, muscles, nerves, and arteries sends spears of agony through Steve’s heart. He grapples to hold onto any sort remnant of himself. Once Thanos has completely replaced each part, what will be left?

Thanos speaks lowly as he works. His touch strangely tender. “As you can see, I am replacing everything on your left side. There will be an imbalance to you as your organic self cannot balance against the artificial limbs and torso. It will rip you apart unless you come to accept who you are.”

Steve moans a little. He cannot hold it back. It hurts too much. Tears from his biological eye stream down his face – a face that’s halved and splayed out. Thanos tisks as he often does when Steve shows emotional deficiencies.

“Next time, I will take care of that. I think it is best if we remove your genitals. It’s not a necessary and it will only impede your devotion to me,” Thanos says and he tosses bones to the floor. He snaps the nanite injection into place and the tiny bio-bugs crawl into Steve’s nerves, into his muscles, into what’s left of the bones of his hand to remodel him. 

The last vestiges of his memory, of the love of his mother comfort him, but Steve’s not sure how long he will be able to secure any serenity from the cold images of a time that seems more and more like a fantasy. He gulps in breath as the pain throbs up his arm, like pins and needles piercing him. He grits his teeth, trying desperately not to react. He needs to find a way to escape this time. He’s tried. 

When they put him in with the Outrider beasts, Steve’s experimented with domesticating the youngest of the monsters. They start out as small almost helpless little beings. Dumped into the incubator parts of the barns. When Steve’s imprisoned with the beasts, he stays close to the barns since it is the safest place to go. No one bothers Steve or tells him to leave the barns. He explored the incubator areas and stole a few of the littlest ones, thinking if he got the monster to trust him maybe he would have a chance. What food he found he gathered from the beasts’ troughs he shared with his little charges. He got them to eat out of his hand, to recognize him. If he could train one, then it would only take a moment to have it kill Cull or Maw and Steve could then escape. 

Steve never understood their biology but when they matured into adolescents the beasts turned into wild animals with no minds of their own, only the need to kill. Steve woke up one morning with the beast he raised attacking him. It gnawed on Steve’s leg, tried to tear his throat out before Steve managed to break its neck. When Thanos heard about the incident, he smiled and said to Steve, “See you are understanding the balance of things.”

He needs to find a way out, to save what little humanity he has left. Steve vows not to succumb to anymore of what Thanos offers. This will be it.

“Stand up,” he murmurs as Thanos works.

His step father stops and places the scalpel on the table. “What’s that my son?”

Steve swallows down the fear and says, loud and clear, “I’ll always stand up. I’ll always fight you. You’ll never have me.”

Thanos glares at him. His purple face a nightmare of solid stone. “It seems your mind is still possessed with your weak humanity. Maybe, this time, I access your brain.” He turns and calls, “Ebony!”

“Yes, my glorious father?” Maw steps into the room.

“Prepare the surgical suite. It’s time.”

“So soon, my lord? You’ve yet to neuter him.” Maw templed his long fingers.

“We’ll do it at the same time,” Thanos says. 

They both leave Steve without another word. He hangs suspended, alone, cold, almost lifeless. They will come back and Thanos will invade his brain. He will cull it and remove parts. Steve will lose the memories of his mother, the memories of the Commandoes he fought alongside, he will lose the memories of love. He’ll forget Gamora and Nebula. He will be gone. He struggles against the bonds but cannot break them. His body and face are still splayed out. 

Yet, as he swings, the fortress rumbles in reply. Desperately, Steve wants relief, but he knows as soon as they appear, he’ll lose everything. He maneuvers in his bonds. He’s tried it a million times before, it never works. He can’t even fight because his left side is split open, splinter and in disarray. He lashes out, screaming and cursing. He calls for help. He cries out for Gamora, for Nebula. Someone must help him.

All the time the fortress rocks beneath him. Steve has no idea why. What new horror is brewing in the bowels of Thanos’ bastion. Steve knows it’s coming for him. Whatever groans through the hallways, he knows it will devour him. Steve has spent his lifetime in this stronghold and still knows nothing about it. Thanos’ minions have always kept it secure and safe. It doesn’t matter Steve will be ruined, wrecked by the man who wants to be his father, but will never have that honor. The fortress shudders again.

An alarm sings out.

Steve listens. The artificial eye sends reading to his brain. The fortress is under attack. Steve tenses, it causes all of the plates of his artificial implants to stress and cause him pain. He cries out but then an emergency protocol engages and abruptly his implants slot back into place. His body relaxes. It takes him a minute as the pain recedes to know he can finally try and break his bonds. He shifts, turns. He needs leverage. Nebula spoke to him about it once, leverage is the key here. 

A crash in the corridor stops him. He hears calls – someone’s yelling for backup. Steve doesn’t recognize the voice. What the hell is happening? He bends upward and attempts to get sidelong glance at the mechanism above him. The bonds that hold him up aren’t visible – they never are. But there’s a force cradling him, holding him in place for Thanos to carve into his body, his limbs. If he can get a good look at it, he might be able to figure out a way to hit a release. Because he still has half a human body, the mechanism holds that side of his body more firmly. He strains to see where the forcefield is generated. It feels like chains, but it isn’t. Steve yanks and heaves, trying to flip over so that he can kick at the ceiling of the cell. Before he can execute the maneuver, an explosion rocks the room.

The mechanism judders and then he crashes to the floor, hitting hard against the tile. Blood and tissues puddle on the floor. Steve shivers as he touches parts that used to be him. He wipes away the tears and staggers to get to his feet. His newly fixed femur doesn’t take his weight well, and he pitches forward, hitting his chin and falling to the floor again. As he struggles the sounds of combat burst through the corridors. He needs to get out, he needs to flee. This is his only chance.

It usually takes days before the artificial bones solidify adequately to maintain function. He doesn’t have that time. He forces himself on to his feet, his mother’s last words to him echoing in his head. He won’t lose his memories of her, what little he has. He won’t forget how to be human, how to be Steve Rogers. 

With every bit of his power, Steve stands upright. He goes to the door, limping as he does and then peers out into the dark corridor. Flashes of light, vibrant and deadly greet him. He presses against the wall. With no weapons or defense, he’ll have a difficult time getting through the combat. But then he remembers his left side – modified to do the bidding of a monster. His arm should be twice, possibly three to four time his right side that is already enhanced. He can punch a powerful blow or take the heat from weapons as well with his forearm. 

Readying his resolve, he waits until there’s a lull and then dashes into the corridor. The fight is close, not as distant as he would like, and he has no idea who the perpetrators are of this gross invasion upon the Titan. Whoever it is, they have no clue who they are up against. Slipping along the side of the hallway, Steve heads toward the lower levels where he knows there are secret passageways to the Outriders pastures. If he can get there, he can surely find a way to escape. 

Momentarily he thinks of Nebula and Gamora. He pauses. He hasn’t seen Gamora in an age. Nebula he has. He should go back, find her. Together they would have more of a chance against the attackers, against their own people. Steve cringes. Thanos’ people are not his people. He was abducted and taken from everything he loved. So was Nebula. He needs to get to her. Even as he picks his way through dead bodies, taking up a blast gun in defense, Steve stops. The fight is on higher floors. He only needs to get a few flights down and he will be free. He can find a way out of the fortress, get to safety, find some way back to Earth. 

Nebula.

Shaking his head, Steve turns around and starts back. Nebula could be anywhere but Steve suspects that she’s probably in one of the other laboratories. There have been times that Thanos liked to torment each one of them in succession. With this in mind, Steve rushes back to the lab level. The combat gets clearer again, not distant shouts and fire blasts anymore. Close, it is so close. Only stopping when the battle is right around the bend of the corridor, Steve makes headway back to the lab level. 

The fortress floor groans under him. The ceiling shakes and dust and debris fall. Steve listens. An aerial attack as well. The boldness of the invaders impresses Steve, but he’s not one to believe he can solicit help from them. Whoever they are, they are as mad as the Titan himself. He doesn’t trust anyone. He learned that long ago.

Maybe his sisters. He might trust them.

Steve sneaks forward, crouching and ready to fall on the floor with the denizens of dead. As he creeps to the lab cells a great commotion howls through the hall. He stops, aims his gun because he has no time to drop and play dead. In front of him a dozen warriors appear. They’re humanoid. Steve targets his gun at the leader. A large man with long blonde hair, a beard, and a hammer in his hand. Foolish weapon. In the back of the group, Steve spots Nebula, partially disassembled, limply hanging in the hands of a red haired and bearded warrior.

The warrior with the hammer raises it. “Yield and no harm will come to you.”

“Drop her,” Steve says and points the gun. He has no intention of surrendering.

“You will yield. This hive of brutality will come to an end. Assassins like you, like her will pay their dues to the All Father,” the man says. “You will stand trial and seek justice or you will find my justice now.”

Steve does not yield. “I always stand up.” He shoots the blaster gun.

The man with the hammer deflects it with the massive tool. “You will pay for that.” The hammer cracks with lightning. “You will surrender.” The lightning crackles and shoots out, hitting Steve along his artificial left arm. 

Steve screams as the pain shoots up his arm, sizzles through his nerves. He falls to his knees as the very breath is stolen from his lungs. The gun falls from his hand. His left arm is numb, the forearm and hand split open, the artificial ligaments and bones glistening. The pain overwhelms him, and he vomits.

“Sif, get him. Bind him. We have more work to do.” 

A woman steps forward as Steve rocks as the pain throbs through him. He considers one last attack, if they kill him so be it. But then he sees Nebula, unconscious and vulnerable to these devils, in their hands. 

As the lady warrior, Sif, steps up to Steve, he mutters through a mouth full of blood, “Who are you?”

She doesn’t answer, but the man with the hammer does. “I am the Prince of Asgard, the heir to the Nine Realm’s throne. I am Thor. And you will be sentenced for your crimes against the galaxy and the Nine Realms by the All Father, Odin, himself. Pray he is merciful.”

Steve stares at the man. He can see that he is, indeed, a god amongst men. But then again so is Thanos. Steve doesn’t believe in mercy. Not from Thanos, not from the All Father and not from the one called Thor. 

TBC


	2. Siblings

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thor learns who the Commander of the Black Order really is, the truth about the aether, and what love and respect mean between siblings.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you thank you thank you x million. It was so wonderful of all of you to greet my story so positively even though it starts out in such a dark time for our heroes! And thank you for welcoming me with open arms into the Thundershield ship! I knew one day I would end up here - I mean Thor was the reason I came to the MCU in the first place....So now in this chapter we get Thor's POV, find out a little more about this AU and a little about what I have in store for you!! I hope you enjoy it!

Thor has never been a man abundant with patience. Ever since his father cast him out to the wilds of Midgard, he deliberately forces himself to step back and assess the situation without prejudice. Or as fairly as he can. As he stands there studying the half cyborg, half human man incarcerated in the bowels of the Asgardian prison, he listens to the readout. Thor dwarfs the woman standing next to him, but she’s not cowed by his presence. She shows him a projection of the man known as Commander of the Black Order. She overlays it with a current image of the man in the corner of the prison cell. 

“The facial recognition image matches, my lord. There is no mistake. He is the infamous Commander of the Black Order,” she says. When Thor peers down at the flickering vision projected from the globe in her hand, he glimpses the reflection in the woman’s eyes. Red against the blue as if the sky bleeds. 

He clears his throat and says, “According to all of our information, the Commander was never a cyborg.”

She smiles and closes her hand over the globe. The projection disappears. “No. But it’s been decades since the Commander’s been seen.”

“Yes, since Thanos’ treaty with the Chitauri.” Thor doesn’t like it. Something’s wrong with it. The man in the corner of the cell looks half starved, looked as if he was trying to escape the Titan’s fortress, not defend it. “All he wanted was the woman.”

“What’s that, my lord?”

Thor shakes his head and doesn’t answer.

“If we’re done, I need to go and discuss with Eir the treatment for our prisoners.” She waits until he nods before giving him a short bow and then swiftly walking away, the drape of her gown making a soft swishing noise against the marbled floor. 

Asgard’s riches are well known throughout the Nine Realms and beyond. Even in the prison the floors are marble, the walls are ornate. While the scourge of the universe are housed in the lower levels of Asgard, the Tombs as they are often called, still herald the best. Thor believes in treating the prisoners with respect, but he wonders about the Children of Thanos. Should they be afforded such luxuries after their legendary plague upon the known worlds? 

Thor studies the man or cyborg in the prison cell before him. He hasn’t moved since Thor arrived. He stays on the bed, huddled close to the corner, nothing like when Thor visits his brother, Loki – just in the other wing of the Tombs. Loki is arrogant and self possessed. With great pleasure he taunts Thor and smirks at him when Thor happens to interrupt a visiting Frigga. The coldness that churns in Thor’s belly can only be from a Frost Giant, but no matter how many times he tries to convince himself that Loki is not Asgardian, that he is from the frozen tundra of Jotunheim, he fails. Thor will always have a soft spot for the dispossessed. 

He narrows his eyes as he considers the prisoner before him. Is this half man one of the evil legion of the Black Order, or is he something more? With only one set course before him, Thor steps up to the cell and says, “Who are you?” Thor knows the answer. A test may not be the best way to go about learning something of this thing, this half man, but subtly was never one of Thor’s best assets. 

The half man lifts his bowed head and stares at Thor. His eyes – one artificial, one real – gaze at him with a piercing light that seeks more than Thor’s willing to offer at the moment. “No one.” His voice sounds ruined, as if he spent hours screaming.

“They tell me you’re the Commander, the myth come to life.” Decades – it has been decades since Odin and Thor heard about the exploits of the famous Commander of the Black Order. When the half man remains silent, Thor commands, “Speak!”

The half man looks at Thor. The weakness in his movements as he struggles to stand are not lost on Thor. He stumbles as if his left artificial leg malfunctions. He limps over to the forcefield separating them. He stands tall, even though the pain is quite blatant on his face, how much that small action takes from him. He speaks with a voice of gravel and stone. “Where is my sister?” It commands but shows compassion at the same time.

“Your sis-.” Thor stops. The woman cyborg. How could they be siblings, they are obviously not even of the same species. Thor stops and drops his chin to his chest. His own brother is not one of blood, or shape, but one of love and shared experiences. A kind gesture may help to bring this half being around. “Your sister is well. We will not harm her. She is safe.”

The half man smirks and rolls his eyes. “I wonder if you are.”

“Do you threaten?” Thor asks as he gazes up at the prisoner. 

The half man walks to the side of the cell and shakes his head. “Perhaps I warn.”

A warning. 

“Do you warn us against yourself, Commander?” Thor waits, watches as the half man wipes away the blood that drips from his nose. From Thor’s perspective, he cannot spot any outward injury that would cause the bloody nose. 

“Rogers, my name is Steve Rogers,” he says and stands taller still even on his half-crippled leg. 

Thor quirks a brow. Over the centuries he’s known many warriors. He’s witnessed their crimes, seen them weep for mercy and rage at their inevitable fate. Yet, this half man puzzles Thor with the pain that haunts his expression against the dignity in the way he holds his frame, his entire self. 

“Tell me Rogers, Steve Rogers, do you show such pride because of the deeds that you’ve swept across the known universe? Have you no humility?” Thor asks. “No shame?”

Something deeply seeded twists in the half man’s face, a tainted stain of poison as if he drank not from the Mimir well of wisdom but from the toxic river waters of Niflheim. A redness warms the one side of his face, the true human side. For the first time, Thor admits that the individual – this Steve Rogers – is most assuredly from Midgard. 

“You know nothing of me,” Rogers snaps and turns away, his hand at his left nostril again.

“And yet I stand before you seeking the knowledge of who you are and what drove you so vehemently?” Thor walks around the cage with it’s three open sides. He can see the stream of blood staining Rogers’ upper lip. He cannot stop himself when he asks, “Are you injured? Do you need a healer?”

Rogers laughs but it cracks the air like a whip, sundering it and laying it bare. “I needed a healer ages ago. When he took a knife to my chest and my face. When he plucked out my eyeball and wore it around his neck like a jeweled trophy!” His agony tipped anger lashes out harsh and hard. “Don’t think you understand. Don’t think I will believe you mean well.”

Thor stares, quiet and contemplative. The look on the man’s face is not one of malicious acrimony, but one of bitterness from hope that has drained away into the dark world. “I ask only to bring some ease to your suffering.” He surprises himself when the words fall from his lips so easily. Yet it has always been Thor’s downfall that he cannot hold a grudge, that he does not search for revenge. A banishment without his powers or his elite position will accomplish that task. “Please, you are obviously in pain.”

Rogers sniffles as if trying to rid himself of the dripping blood. “There’s nothing you can do. It’s been this way for decades. Since he cut my face.” Done with speaking to Thor, he walks over to the bed and sits down, his shoulders slumped forward as if all of his bravado flowed out of him.

“I can see if there’s anything our healers can do. Eir is a great women of the healing arts.” Thor starts away and then backtracks. “Are you human?”

Rogers closes his eyes and puts a hand over his face. “I used to be.”

“From Midgard – Earth as you would know it -then?” Something tightens in Thor’s chest when Rogers nods. “How?”

Rogers looks off into the distance, blinking too fast. “He took me as a child. I was only 8. He did this to me.”

The paradox of the man before him and his legacy, his legend mystifies Thor. For nearly a century the myth ruled the consciousness of the Nine Realms and all of the expanse beyond it. Many times in the past, Thor had wanted to meet the Commander of the Black Order. Not to sing hymns of battle with him or to drink the finest mead in Asgard but to defeat him and bring him to justice. Yet the broken half man half cyborg in front of him belays all of his past motivations. Perhaps this beast is not the monster at all. 

“Is he dead?” 

The words jolt Thor out of his reverie, and he focuses on the man in front of him. A man. Not a half man but a human being from his adopted home world of Earth, Midgard. “Dead? Who?”

“Thanos. Did you kill him?”

Thor shakes his head. “No. His Black Order legion with the help of the remaining Chitauri forces assisted the Titan’s escape. We razed the planet. Your father yet lives.”

Rogers gazes right at Thor, meets his eyes. “He’s not my father. He’s my nightmare.”

Thor acknowledges this piece of information with a simple nod. There is much to be learned, and much to unpack within the dynamics in the House of Titan. “You should rest. There is food. It will be provided three times daily.” He points to the slot on the far wall. “If you require anything, please allow us to know so that you may be at ease during your confinement.”

Rogers wipes away a droplet of blood from his nostril again, the red lingers on his finger and then slides down the artificial digit to the marble tiled floor of his cell. “What does it matter if I eat? I am condemned either way.”

Thor has no answer for him. His fate is not in the Asgardian’s prince’s hand. Only the wisest amongst the Asgardians may decide his punishment. With a short bow, Thor leaves the cell behind the thought buzzing in his brain like an annoying insect – what if the scourge of the galaxy, the Commander of the Black Order – is yet another victim of the mad Titan? Surely, the stories must be true. He recalls the stories of brutality, ghastly deeds, but also the more conflicting stories where the Commander was overcome with emotion and sympathy, allowing a planet’s inhabitants to live and negotiate a peace. Most had said the latter only an alternation of historical facts. To the victor go the spoils and the honor of writing history. 

What is truth? What is falsehood?

He can think of only one person who might be able to help him discern the difference. Thor turns the corner and heads toward the prison cell for his brother, Loki. As he approaches, his pace slows down until he fully stops. His brother, sentenced to centuries in a cell. Losing Loki spears Thor in the heart. Throughout their childhood, they revolved around a central point like planets rotating around a star. But their orbits weren’t stable, they spiraled downward toward their own fiery ends. Where Thor broke his father’s rules, and Loki betrayed Asgard through alliances with the devil himself. How could their sibling rivalry for their father’s attention sell their souls, ruin their brotherhood. 

But then again, Loki is not his brother. 

Not truly.

Does blood define love? Does it define family? 

Losing Loki drains the hope from Thor’s heart, eats away at the courage he built all of the years growing up with his brother. Many call him the God of Thunder yet not many know his courage, his bravery, his thirst for wisdom rooted in his childhood, his natural competition with his brother. He succeeded because he had a metric to measure his worth against. Worth is nothing if it is not calibrated. And maybe even that was selfish – that may have driven Loki toward the edge of questionable actions and then quite possibly pushed him over the precipice into the darkness. The imagery only brought back memories of losing Loki over the Bifrost. Still to this day he had no idea how Loki survived.

Loki keeps his secrets.

But not this time. This time Thor needs to know.

With new determination, Thor sweeps aside his melancholy thoughts of yesterday and strides over toward Loki’s prison cell. When he glimpses Loki he spies his mother as well. Always. Frigga has a soft spot for Loki and always will. When she catches sight of her other son, Frigga smiles and then bows her head as her image dissipates. Loki sees him then and the softened features he shared with their mother disintegrate as quickly as their mother had. 

“Ah, dearest brother,” Loki says. He’s outfitted in his formal attire. Thor doesn’t know if it’s an illusion or real. Maybe the love Loki had for him was only an illusion, one of his magic tricks.

“Your sentence will not be commuted even if you try and manipulate our mother.” Thor stops and crosses his arms over his chest. 

“As I have told her multiple times, she is not my mother.” He glares at Thor as if he has the upper hand. 

Thor casts aside the argument. Normally, he would defend their mother, but he recognizes that Loki baits him, because he knows what it does. His brother knows that lashing out at their devoted mother always sends Thor into a tailspin. In his heart of hearts, Loki loves Frigga; she is the only mother he’s ever known. She’s protected him, taught him, cared for him. Thor only wishes that Loki wouldn’t use his mother’s love as a weapon.

Today, though, Thor has other concerns. “Tell me what you know of the one they call the mad Titan.”

Loki smiles, a devious yet playful expression. He raises a finger and places it near his lips as if he’s trying to quiet a bothersome child. “He is not to be reckoned with, oh mighty Prince of Asgard.”

“You know of him, tell me what you know.” Thor stands his ground, ready for the long run around by his brother. As children, Thor learned to wait out his brother, who had a tendency toward impatience and rash decisions. Some of that rubbed off on Thor over the years and may have led to his foolish behavior before he landed on Midgard. Yet, as young children it had been Loki who rushed to please or rush to impression. Or overdid his work.

Once as young boys they were instructed on the holographic artforms popular in the day. Thor made a model of mighty ash tree, Yggdrasil, while Loki created a magnificent rendering of the legendary maelstrom, Hvergelmir. It was clear to everyone in the classroom that Loki’s work excelled and that Thor’s model was adequate. The arts had never been his strongest suit. But Loki wanted so much to impress their father he ended up, ruining his holographic image. He went too far, re-worked it to touch it up only to find it simply fell apart. 

Thor uses this to his advantage now. He paces to the side of the cell. “But perhaps you never met this Thanos. Perhaps you were like his other slaves and servants, only a minor atom in a larger array of the universe.”

“Don’t try and impress me with your devilry. You can’t outsmart me, Thor, you never could.” Loki glances away as if trying to hide his curiosity. He plays with the cuticles on his one hand. 

Approaching the caged tiger another way, Thor frowns and nods. “Perhaps you are right, dear Loki. Perhaps you have bewitched and beguiled me too many times. I might be too foolish to weigh your words with any gravity at all.”

Loki snickers and walks to the edge of the platform in the cell. “You think I don’t know the happenstance upon which you come to me. You’ve taken to clearing out the root of the poison that attacked your precious Midgard, but you cannot comprehend the truth of why he does it.” Loki leans in and the cell crackles in response. “You know of the Commander of the Black Order. You know of his daughters. You know that he razes half of the populations, leaving worlds decimated in his wake. But you don’t understand that my intercession saved your little planet. If you hadn’t interfered with your Midgardian playmates, then it would have been safe.”

“Would have been?” Thor laughs. “It is safe. We stopped your attack. The Chitauri are scattered, demolished by our own hand. You are sentenced to a lifetime in a cell.”

Loki looks down at him, a flicker of pain and brilliance in his eyes. “And yet you search for him. You go from planet to planet looking for him. You use up all of the rest of our father’s dark magic while the Bifrost is regrown. Be careful, brother, you may not want to see what you sow.”

“You speak in riddles. Be plain!” Thor shouts. He’d tried to hold back his temper, but the flare of fear and the growing threat of storms ahead thundered through him and he struck out, lightning to ground. 

His vent means nothing to his brother. Loki tilts his head and observes the rage, the impatience, race through Thor. It isn’t lost on him that just moments ago he thought of his brother as the impatient one. Rotating his shoulders, Thor exhales and then says, “Please, brother, tell me what you know of the Children of Thanos.”

Loki seems to draw on his plea, a kind of sweet succor blushes over his usually chiseled pale features. “The Children of Thanos are a special breed. Some say he has two daughters only.” Loki whispers the words but as he does he spins a web. “The daughters are well known, as you probably can tell me. Gamora and Nebula. Assassins without mercy.” He pauses and then makes a slight ticking noise. “But some say we are all foolish to think he only has the two daughters. Because there is a third, the son.”

Always as children, Loki mesmerized Thor with his tales. When late at night after Odin spent the day training his children with frightening stories of trolls or the dark world, Niflheim, it had always been Loki that Thor depended upon. They would lie in bed and Loki would weave his stories, filled with conquests, adventure, and mystery. Each night Thor begged his brother for another story, another tale of the Nine Realms and Loki would comply. 

It is no different now.

Loki crouches down, close to Thor. “They say the Commander is the enigma of the Black Order, the child of Thanos, the son of Hel or possibly the offspring of the Celestials. No one truly knows. But there is one tale that strikes true.”

Thor says nothing. To break the spell might throw Loki into his reticent gloom. To allow him to continue feeds into his ever-blossoming ego. 

“The story goes that the Commander was a rat – a scrawny creature of no worth whatsoever until Thanos plucked him for your beloved Midgard itself. Brought him to his fortress and performed a kind of Rebirth on the boy who would be man. His transformation led to his donning the uniform of the Commander of the Black Order. Maybe it was magic or Ebony Maw who changed him, but some say it didn’t change the rat into a lion, it only made him more cowardly.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Of course you don’t,” Loki continued. “Sent on mission by his lofty father, many say he failed. Others say the Commander was more brutal and cruel than his two sisters combined. Though all say that after he invaded and destroyed worlds, he would sit by the smoking burnt out cities and weep.”

“Weep?” Thor turns and looks down the long hallway toward the cell where the Commander sits.

“They said he begged his father, that he wanted to prove his worth. Thanos acquiesced to his beloved son’s request. Sent him back to your Midgard during one of their most dreaded world wars. He was to retrieve the Tesseract, an item of great significance. He failed and Thanos has held him and tortured him ever since.” Loki finishes not with a flare but with a cast aside look as if he’s only just thrown away trash. “The Commander only condemned his birth planet to destruction as did you. Earth and all on it will fall to her knees before Thanos because you are a fool, brother.”

“You love to weave your fantasies, Loki, but Earth is safe. I and the Avengers have seen to it.” 

Loki stands up. In his prison cell on a platform, he towers over Thor. “Is it? Is that what you think? That a Titan, one that’s mad and has cut a swath so deep and so profound across the cosmos would just give up?” He hisses as he speaks. “Listen to me, brother, listen to me now if you ever did. Thanos will stop at nothing. Nothing. He will get what he wants. And he will lay ruin to everything and everyone in his path.”

“And you found him a soulmate.”

“I found him a tool!” Loki sneers. “You fool, you let your precious Midgard out of my grasp. He would have left it alone had you not been such a fool. He will lay waste to it now, looking for what he’s sought for centuries.”

“He will find nothing!” Thor counters, but the truth lies in his heart that hammers so hard he cannot hear over its pounding. 

Loki turns away from Thor. 

“If you ever had love for our mother, then you would offer me the key to his destruction.”

Loki stops, half turns, and then says, “The Commander.”

“The Commander?”

Loki faces away again. “The Commander has always been the key. He will be the undoing of the mad Titan. It is the only reason he was taken from his home in the first place.”

“But that would mean-.” Thor stops, frozen in the warped thought of Thanos, time, and reality. “That would mean.” He cannot say it out loud for to do so would shatter his understanding of life, his reality.

“Yes, it would mean exactly that,” Loki whispers and then adds, “You tire me, brother. Go. I’ll say no more today.”

At first, Thor thinks to grill him, but the urgency of his own insight changes his mind and he heads toward the palace and the upper floors. He should search for his mother and request her counsel, but instead he decides it’s best to speak with Heimdall. 

Since the breakage of the Bifrost, Heimdall spends his days overseeing the construction of the bridge once again. Not many know of Heimdall’s quick intelligence with the augury of the Bifrost or as Jane might call it the astrophysics of the bridge through space-time. Heimdall, the watchman and all seer of Asgard has been Thor’s friend since his boyhood days. Though Heimdall was not his contemporary, Thor grew up admiring him, learning from him, and then finally befriending him. While Thor might not follow his magic, he does appreciate the intricacies of Heimdall’s service to the crown. 

Thor crosses over the stretch of the Bifrost still intact. It pulses with a spectrum of color, tinted with golds reflected from the mighty palace of Asgard. How many times had Thor found himself asking Heimdall for promises of the future, how many times did he question Heimdall about his far-seeing eyes, at once a blessing and a curse. The last time Thor queried Heimdall about the good doctor, Jane Foster, he learned she’d moved on. Her life was her own, after all, and he just a passing star amongst the many she studied. It might hurt him, but he could not blame her. After all, Odin forbade Thor from anymore relationships with Midgardians.

“You need to take a spouse,” Odin had told him after he’d brought Loki home in chains. “The Realms are shaken by Loki’s betrayal. First, it was your impetuous ways, and now it is your brother’s devious ones. As a show of strength and continuity, you should take a spouse and settle down.”

Thor had not answered at first, his mind a buzz with his thoughts of Jane. 

“You cannot marry the girl, not from Midgard. It is a poor Realm and a backwater one as well,” Odin spoke softly, but with a fierce condemnation of Thor’s heart. “You must marry a strong warrior, one with intent in their heart and with courage, fortitude.”

“Jane has all of these things,” Thor had countered.

Odin did not rebuke him. “She may, she may.” He nodded and stroked his beard as they stood over the training courtyard watching the Warriors Three and Sif test each other. “But she is not focused on your legacy. She is focused inward. Ask Heimdall. It is not a time for her to be with you. She never will have that time. You must look for someone of your equal who will be there to support you and to fight and stand beside you.”

Thor pretended not to see Odin intent stare at Sif or even at Fandral. Neither of them had stolen Thor’s heart. He loved them, yes, but as companions, brothers/sisters in arms. Not as a mate. 

Later, Thor tested whether or not he was meant to find a mate whether or not Jane would be the one to support him, guard him, become his queen. Heimdall gave him the security to know that Jane Foster found peace, and safety, but also love in the arms of another scientist. It seemed a good pairing, and so Thor moved away from his love. 

What scares him most is that it wasn’t hard. 

He found himself without a strong attachment to Jane. The damage of losing his faith in people had been done. He loved Loki and his brother betrayed him. That betrayal sliced deep and it widened the gap between Thor and the rest of the populace. He would forever find himself alone, an island unto himself.

Walking toward the great entrance to the universe, the beginning and end of the Bifrost, Thor steps into the golden dome. Even now, it glimmers with an ethereal shine, though it is quite dull compared to what it used to be. Heimdall stands at the center, the sword set aside as he stares into the pure energy of light streaming from the sword’s scabbard embedded in the center of the floor. Runes dance above his head and his enchanted eyes follow them. He plucks a few out of the stream of light – they dissipate. He re-arranges others. The scabbard acts as the Bifrost forge. 

Thor watches him for several minutes before Heimdall says, “Are you going to make yourself useful today, Prince, or are you going to bother me all day?”

Smiling, Thor steps up to the dais. “How goes the work?”

Heimdall takes a moment before he answers, swiping away the rest of the Runes and then closing down the energy forge with the shaft of the sword. “Slowly.”

“It is good to know. Father’s use of the dark energy has taxed him too much. He cannot go on using it to ferry people about the Realms. Most have taken to starships to navigate the Realms these days.”

“You mean, cart you around the Realms,” Heimdall says and stands from his kneeling position. He studies Thor. “Tell me, what bothers you?”

“I thought you were all seeing.” Trying to avoid the reason he came to consult with Heimdall is just counter intuitive. He scoffs at himself. “I have a question to ask you, Heimdall. I need an honest answer.”

Heimdall touches the hilt of the sword, looks at his roughened hands, and then up at Thor. He nods. “So ask.”

“We’ve met Thanos before?”

“Yes, you know this. Why ask?” Heimdall’s casual attitude belies the truth.

“I’m not talking about recent battles.” Thor narrows his eyes as he watches the all seer. The precipice before them yawns open and wide. Heimdall will either be with him, side by side, or will chose the gap beyond the cliff. 

Heimdall picks another path. It shouldn’t surprise Thor. Heimdall has always seen pathways and methods beyond the ordinary. “What do you know of the aether?” 

Thor stammers over an answer. Instead of feeling like an equal to Heimdall, he once again takes the position of student looking for guidance from his mentor and teacher.

“The aether is a powerful stone, an infinity stone.” 

“Yes. Yes, I’ve heard of the infinity stones. But those are a fairy tale, a children’s story,” Thor asserts. If he’s so sure, then why does his chest tighten and the breath in his lungs burn. “Are you telling me-. What are you telling me?”

“Surely, you know the Tesseract that your brother Loki played with has powers to twist space, opening up portals. It is one of the stones as is the aether.” Heimdall’s golden eyes harden as he speaks. “The aether is parasitic in nature. An infinity stone of malevolence. It can possess a person and devour the person and do as it must to twist reality.”

“And what does this have to do with Thanos?” Thor teetered.

“The aether has been disturbed. Once five thousand years ago Asgard took the aether away from Malekith. Bor stowed it away, safe. Yet now, it has been disturbed by the Convergence of worlds.” Heimdall holds onto the sword. “I see many souls, but as the Convergence is upon us, I see the many lives of each of those souls.”

“What are you saying, Heimdall?” 

“The aether alters what we know of reality,” Heimdall says. “The Convergence is the fuel for the fire. Listen to me, my friend, when the Convergence affects the aether reality shifts.”

“But the aether should be safe away from this Convergence.”

“For centuries the mad Titan has plagued the universe at large.” Heimdall leaves the dais and stares out into the starry night. “He’s searched for the infinity stones. You think he doesn’t know how the Convergence and the aether are inter-related? You think he doesn’t know how to use the Convergence to get to the aether itself?”

It hits Thor, a boulder to his chest. He shivers in a breath. “He’s changed reality.”

“To the extent that he can.” Heimdall bows slightly. 

Pieces start to fall into place. “And what do you see, how different?”

Heimdall grimaces as he answers, “I cannot say for I have been altered as well.” 

Thor prefers his idea of life and reality to be set in stone, etched with a fine chisel that cannot be disturbed. The idea that reality has morphed, shifted, means that the stones – the brick and mortar – of reality are not as he would assume. They are not a foundation, but ever-moving plates, like the geological theory of tectonics. They move and reshape worlds. They change lives.

Heimdall continues, “You know of the fruits of Vanaheim?”

Thor furrows his brows and the non sequitur confuses him. “Yes. It is a bountiful world.”

“The most succulent of fruits, the vanatia, is a layered fruit,” Heimdall says and smiles. “You peel it open, and then peel layer after layer. Each layer a different taste, but it culminates to center the Vanir say is the truth. The heart of it.”

“You are saying that the reality, the layers are folded upon one another. All I need do is peel them back.” 

Heimdall places a booted foot on the dais and leans his elbows on his knee. “If you could, I would say that. But you cannot. No one can. All you can do is to find out the reason Thanos wanted to bend reality. Why change it? How did he change it? What was the reason, the fulcrum of his change?” 

As Thor listens to Heimdall he pictures the vanatia, a beautiful blushed fruit with a smooth peel. The pinks and oranges always reminded him of sunset. Some called it the sunset fruit. Great chefs pared each layer separately using the individual layers to season and flavor foods as different as juices and meats. Thinking of reality as a layered entity with different veracities revealed at each level, from each perception, from different viewpoints washes away Thor’s hope for a simple black and white solution to confronting Thanos.

“He will not be an easy foe to defeat,” Thor mutters.

Heimdall stands straight, his height used to intimidate Thor when he was a child. “Now you are getting it, my friend.”

“We nearly had him at the fortress.” Thor shakes his head, sighs. “But the horrors we found. I couldn’t leave the prisoners chained like that, used like that.”

Heimdall grips Thor’s shoulder, squeezes it in companionship. “You are a good man, Thor. You have done well. You would not have been able to fight him and win. Not now. You are not ready. Someday you will be, but not then. You don’t have all of the tools, nor all of the right people by your side.”

Riddles. His life consists of people who liked to talk in riddles. 

Thor takes his leave, the burden of what he learned pressing hard on his shoulders. It isn’t the end to what he learns. Over the next days, Eir, the healer, studies both the Commander and the daughter of Thanos – Nebula. While the Commander is somewhat compliant, the daughter is not. She fights and beats and screams at every opportunity. A rage of hatred runs through her. Several times, Thor is called to help contain her. By the time he secures her back in her cell, sweat drips down his brow. She is a formidable foe. Neither the Commander nor Nebula offer any secrets.

“We must find the last assassin, Gamora, she is the deadliest amongst them,” Odin says as Thor visits his father in his observatory. The circular room is framed by windows and a golden dome. Artifacts of their ancient days decorate the room, along with ancient tools and instruments to study the night skies. “Neither of our prisoners will give any information on her whereabouts.”

“It might be best, Father, to focus on the mad Titan. After all, he is the biggest threat to the Nine Realms and the outer worlds,” Thor says and settles next to a telescope that’s perched near one of the open windows. It’s day time and birds sing and flutter outside of the tower windows.

Odin gives Thor a half frown. “Maybe. But I think if we had all three of his children, Thanos himself may turn his eye toward us. We may, in fact, force a confrontation.”

“Is that wise, Father? We need more information. He slipped through our fingers too many times. He left his children behind without regard to their safety.”

Odin smirks, the crinkles around his eyes brighten his visage. “Oh but, we don’t have his favorite. She – Gamora – is his favorite.” Odin holds up a finger to stop Thor from questioning him. “Because she is ruthless and well known. She spreads his fear far and wide. He is most proud of her. I know this as a father knows.”

“He abandoned his other children to us!” Thor retorts. How could any father profess to love his children if he left them to an uncertain fate at the hands of an enemy. “How could he be capable of love?”

“Who spoke anything of love?” 

“Then what do we do?” Thor asks. 

“We find out from our guests,” Odin says and then gazes out the windows, watching his ravens play in the warm day’s sun. “Give them some time together. They will reveal themselves.”

Thor considers his father’s advice. It could work, almost as devious as something Loki might offer. Still, his concerns about the aether and how Thanos perverted it to warp reality prey on his mind. Although he’s mentioned Heimdall’s revelations to Odin, Thor hasn’t known his father’s plans to combat the monster. “And what of the aether?”

The glimmer fades from Odin’s features. “You are correct, son. The aether has been disturbed. The Convergence has brought worlds together. We should have been on our guard. We were not. The mad man has exploited the weakness and has taken it.”

“Taken it!”

Odin holds up his hand to quiet Thor. “We need information. Put the siblings together. We need to find the last one to lure their father to us.”

Thor exhales a tense breath. It does nothing to alleviate the tightening fist squeezing his chest. His hand itches for Mjolnir. He quells his need less the hammer fling itself through the palace halls and hurt someone to answer his call. His father’s course of action is logical and shrewd. Thor bows. “I will see to it.”

As Thor heads toward the circular stairway in the center of the room, Odin turns his patched eye to him. “And Thor, think about what I said. The Realms need stability. They need a Prince and a Consort at the very least.”

Thor says nothing. He always dreamed of marrying for love, not duty. It is said that Frigga and Odin did not love one another at first. They found love over the years. Maybe Thor still harbored foolish thoughts because of his youthful age. 

Foolish indeed. 

As he departs his father’s tower, Thor murmurs, “And in my youth I longed for war.” Yet what does it mean to yearn for the destruction and blood of others. The poets and authors of glorious odes know nothing of the sweat and tears of battle. They know nothing of the smell of it, the taste of metal in the air, the retched filth encrusted under nails. They know nothing of the scent of bodies split open or of young soldiers crying out for their mothers as they die alone on the field. No, Thor isn’t one to glorify it anymore. 

Perhaps his father is right. He should set aside the youthful challenges and settle into a more comfortable life, take on the responsibilities of the throne. He crosses the courtyard and enters the East Wing. He doesn’t stop for a chat with the guards, but heads toward the prison cells underneath the grand palace. The Tombs.

As a child he raced through these halls with a blind abandon. He never realized his brother running next to him hid a terrible secret beneath his skin. All through the years, he thought of Asgard as a safe and peaceful place. Yet, this mad Titan haunted the reaches of the universe, plagued the outer worlds. And now, he attacked the Nine Realms. He’d stolen the aether – but when and how did he change reality. What did he see in reality that he needed to change it? Loki hinted at the Children of Thanos, at the Commander, but how could that be? They were defiled and mutated to act in their father’s stead. Were they redeemable? 

By the time he enters the prison, the guards have transferred the Commander to his sister’s cell. Thor raises a brow at that – it is obvious they didn’t want to deal with transferring the female. She reminds Thor of a feline – deadly, arrogant, and cunning. As he approaches the cell, he sees his mother standing outside of it. Her eyes are transfixed on the pair beyond the energy barrier. 

Whether Frigga had ventured down to the prison levels to visit Loki again, Thor disregards and instead focuses on her study of the two inmates. “What do you see?” 

“Two odd souls thrown together as siblings, yet very much protective of one another,” Frigga says, though she never takes her eyes off the pair in the prison cell. 

The cell is much like the Collector’s display cases, open and exposed. The Commander, his name is Steve Rogers, sits on the floor directly across from Nebula. They stare deeply into one another’s eyes, hands on each other’s faces as if they might block prying eyes from seeing them. They speak not a word. They remain in silent communion with one another. 

A boiling rage fires in Thor’s belly. Two sibling, so different but so connected. It looks like a different world to him. Odin had always set he and Loki on a path toward competing with one another, always fighting for attention and love. It accelerated out of control, like a whirling dervish, knocking away hopes, dreams, and futures. 

Yet these two – who obviously love and support one another – were raised and trained by a mad man with a quest to change all of the Realms and the outer worlds. They were tortured and changed, yet here they sit together.

“What do they do?” Thor mutters.

“Why do you need to know?” Frigga asks. She tears her attention away from the two in the cell and looks at Thor. “Is this only to gather information or to give them peace.”

“Don’t be naïve, Mother,” Thor says and shrugs off the feelings of inadequacies. He needs to know what the Titan intends to do next and he needs to know where the other assassin, Gamora is. “They are criminals, same as Loki.”

“Are they?” Frigga turns back to the cage to stare at the siblings. Thor marks it as the first time Frigga acknowledged Loki’s guilt, but then she smashes his conclusions as sure as if she bashed it with his hammer. “Wasn’t Loki lured by Thanos to do his bidding?”

“It’s not the same thing,” Thor says. “Loki had much more freewill. Think of how much these two must have gone through-.”

“How do you know they weren’t volunteers? That they didn’t welcome it?” Frigga asks. A glint in her eyes tells Thor enough.

“You know no one would volunteer for what we know has happened. We brought the data back with us. Eir has studied all of it.” Thor shakes his head. “No, they have been tortured and manipulated. Loki has always used what he could to get what he wanted.”

“And you think Loki used Thanos? That anyone could use that beast?”

Thor concedes, “No. I think Loki thought he was clever and that he could use Thanos for his own means.” He steps away from his mother, closer to the seemingly open cage. As he watches the pair, they never move. Sitting crossed legged face to face, they keep their hands on each other’s cheeks, eyes unmoving. Blood drips freely from the left nostril of Steve. His human eye is blood shot, the pain evident. “What are they doing?”

His mother answers him. “Communicating.”

Thor snaps his attention back to his mother. “What?”

“They both have artificial eyes with intelligent links to their brains. Eir has said the eyes are interfaces.”

“This will never do!” Thor states. “We need information on what Thanos plans. Why he stole the aether. How long ago? What he intends to do! We need their sister.”

Frigga lays a hand on his arm. “You won’t find anything out about their sister from them. They are too devoted. Maybe you’ll find out information onThanos because of their abiding hatred for their step father, but not Gamora.”

Frigga’s words come true. Even after Thor has Eir study everything about the sibling’s interactions without a means to download the information gathered by the eyes, they have no recourse. Odin intervenes.

“We must take the eye, at least one of them.”

Thor stands in the throne room with Eir, Heimdall, and Frigga as Odin’s council. Eir agrees, “I can prep the soul forge. It might take some time, but I can modify the forge’s energy patterns to recognize a foreign object and remove it.”

“You cannot take their eyes,” Frigga says. “They were prisoners-.”

“They were not!” Odin says and stands from his golden throne. “They wreaked havoc across the known universe. The woman, Nebula, is cruel and unapologetic for her deeds. The man, the Commander is well known for the scourge he burnt across the outer worlds.”

“Many years ago. He hasn’t been seen or heard from in three quarters of a century. Considering the physiology of humans this cannot be the same man,” Frigga says. “He would be of great age, or even dead by now.”

“He’s been altered,” Eir states. “From everything I know about human physiology, this man has been altered more than what we see with the implants. The soul forge does not lie. He has been altered. His soul’s energy conjures a very different profile. The Runes I’ve acquired are quite different from a normal human’s.”

“And what do you know of a normal human?” Thor jumps in to ask. Part of him – a small quiet part – wants so much to believe his mother. That this human, this Steve Rogers, had nothing to do with what is known of the Commander.

“Do not question, Eir, my son,” Odin says. He steps down from his throne. “We will do it. Take the Commander’s eye.”

“But he has only one human eye,” Thor says. “You’ll leave him blinded.”

“Either way we will leave one of them blinded,” Odin says. “If we don’t take his eye, then we will have the female’s eyes – which are both implants – to manipulate. Is it not correct Eir, that your studies of them has shown the male to have significant problems with the implants?” 

“This is true, but especially for the eye.”

“Then we take his eye. It will be a mercy for him,” Odin says. He doesn’t listen to anymore of Thor’s protests. He only orders Eir to prepare the forge while telling the guards to separate the siblings. Nothing Thor says after the fact changes Odin’s mind.

“If you want I can hang him on Yggdrasil and see what wisdom comes to him,” Odin lashes out.

Thor quiets then leaving his father. He finds his way back to the cell where the guards have transferred Steve. He finds Steve sitting on the cot with a cloth to his nostril. It is covered in blood. 

“He means to take your eye,” Thor says without a greeting.

Steve glances at Thor but doesn’t hold his gaze. “He’s no better than Thanos.”

“Odin is the All Father and you should respect him. He’s brought peace to the Nine Realms which you and yours have tried to destroy over the centuries.”

Steve straightens his shoulder, stands to his full height – which Thor thinks is formidable. “Your All Father has brought destruction to the cosmos as well. What do you think he did to secure the Nine Realms? Peaceably? No. Not that I heard on my travels.”

“Your travels are marred with blood and mayhem.” Thor knows the tales of Odin and how he brought peace and security to the Nine Realms. He’ll hear nothing of these lies. 

“I stopped the mad Titan in his tracks again and again. I sacrificed my mind to it. My sanity to him, so that I could save as many lives as I could. I sacrificed my sister! My sister! Do you know why she’s the way she is?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. He charges the invisible barrier, blood staining his lips. “Because I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t kill innocents. She – She did it for me. It scarred her. Ruined her. He beat her and chained her and removed every piece and part of her. You think this is bad?” He hits his mechanical chest. “What happened to her is ten, no a hundred times worse! She kept me safe, my other sister kept me true to myself. They sacrificed everything for me. So if I have to give you my eye, or both eyes I will. To save them, I will.”

Thor’s mouth drops open in stunned silence. The silence yawns open so deep and dark that he believes he can hear the call of the wolf beast Fenrir from his bound cavern. Yet through the darkness a shining brilliance hits him, blinds him with its truths. However, Thanos changed the universe lies in the wake of these three siblings. He took them to change the world. Thor knows it as surely as he knows the grip of Mjolnir. 

“You will never tell us where your other sister, Gamora, is, will you?”

Steve only shakes his head.

“He will hang you from the tree of life and you will know true wisdom then. It will torment you for the rest of your days,” Thor says.

“Then so be it,” Steve says. “I won’t give them up. I am the guilty one. I am the one who failed to stop him. I am the one who failed to stand up to him. Take me. Let them go.”

Thor searches the vehemence in the Commander’s eyes, but all he sees is earnest truth, the drive to do the right thing so clearly etched on the wounded man’s face. Steve wipes away the blood, smearing it along his hand. Thor wonders at this man before him. A villain would surely strive to protect himself at all costs, yet maybe he is diluted and foolish. “What proof do we have of your actions?”

“Gorgonna,” Steve says. “I negotiated a peace so that Thanos would not raze the world. I went to Earth as a reward after. I was sent to collect the Tesseract so that Thanos would be able to step between worlds with the space stone. I didn’t give in. I put it in the ocean and then downed my plane. I went to my death in hopes of defeating him from getting all of the infinity stones.”

“The Tesseract has been found,” Thor says and thinks of his brother. Loki, so foolishly embroiled with his own drives and wants he never thought about what the consequences might be on a grander scale. As gods they had that responsibility, but Loki never shouldered it. 

“They should have left it in the ocean,” Steve mutters.

“And he has the reality stone, the aether.”

“Since when?”

“The Convergence is upon us.” Thor doesn’t explain that Thanos probably took the stone in recent days and then altered as much of the past as possible. He doesn’t reveal that the man before him and his sisters were most probably altered until they were unidentifiable in their new lives. “He has at least two stones. Possibly more.”

“Xander has fallen. From my understanding the power stone had been secured there,” Thor says. It was old news, but it still shocks the man in front of him. “Are you him? Are you the Commander?”

“Yes.”

“How is it possible that you live still?” Thor asks. “I know humans as short lived.”

“Does it matter?” Steve says. “I won’t hide behind a false curtain to save myself. Take my eye. I will give you as much information about Thanos as possible, but I won’t give up my sister.”

“Your courage is remarkable.”

It is the first time Thor sees him smile. It doesn’t touch his one human eye. “Or I’m just very stubborn.”

“I think we have something in common,” Thor notes. “I will bring your case to my father once again.”

Odin thwarts all of Thor’s protests, all of his arguments. “You have the evidence in front of you, yet you chose to ignore it. Thanos took the aether. He controls it as an infinity stone. It means he must have a gauntlet. Don’t you see, these prisoners are our allies, not our enemies.”

Odin leans heavily on his staff as they meet in the throne room once again. It is only Thor and his father this time. “And so I must forgive all that they have done in the past? Is the soldier not responsible for what they’ve done? Is it only the General?”

“They are not soldiers. They are victims. Have you seen them? Have you even looked at them?” Thor yells. He knows he should keep his temper, but the urgency overcomes all sane thought. 

“You would say the same of the one called Gamora? I hear she does not have these implants. She isn’t a ruin of torture as her brother and sister.” Odin waits. Somewhere far off, Thor hears the caw of his ravens.

“He offered his eye for his sister’s freedom. Is that not enough to show something?” 

“If you are so wise, my son, then I think we must test him to see just how wise this child of Thanos is.” 

Thor thinks he has won, but he hasn’t.

Not at all.

He won’t take the prisoner’s eye, but he will hang him on the tree of life. 

And in the fall of night as they prepare the tree of Yggdrasil to accept the prisoner, Thor watches the Norns and sees their pots of poison and their threads of malice. In the shadows that play in the firelight, he spies the truth of what the prisoner said. There is no sympathy in Odin’s judgement for the prisoners. 

The Norns. 

As maidens of the tree of life, they tend to its roots and ensure its survival. The branches reach up into the cosmos and support the worlds of all of the Nine Realms. The roots dig deep into the fertile grounds, fed by the pots that the Norns tend. Each root and off branching of the roots are the souls of the world, each branch above into the night sky are the lives extended and alive. Those were stories his mother told him as a child, yet everyone knows the Norns play a part in the sequence of time and space and reality. The maidens never die. They are attached to Yggdrasil as surely as the tree grows in the ground. 

If they are, indeed, goddesses of time and space then they would know reality. He walks to Urd the maiden of fate and destiny. She is known to care for the past in lives tended by the tree. “Urd.”

The crone only glances at him as she winds the tendrils of the tree free to accept a prisoner. 

“You three are like Heimdall in a way.”

Urd says nothing in return. Perhaps he has listened to fairy tales for too long. Jane always told him he had a tendency to believe in magic, when it was just science unexplained. 

“You see the past, the present, and the future through the living roots of Yggdrasil as he sees it through the stars.”

“Truth.” Her voice grates in the air. She is older than Odin, older than the woods. He wonders if she is older than the tree itself.

“If you see the past, and your sister Verdandi sees the present while Skuld sees the future, then you would know.”

She stops weaving the thick branches that shouldn’t be molded; they are wood and barbed, but her hands never bleed.

“If you see all of time, then surely you know,” Thor says.

“Know what?” Urd asks.

“Know that he has changed reality. He’s done something with the aether.”

“The aether has been taken. Odin knows of this. He has waited too long. The changes have been set.”

“Can it be changed?” Thor asks. “Can reality be fixed?”

Urd laughs; it scratches the air. “What is reality?” She doesn’t wait for him to hammer his question at her. “No. Reality is ever flowing like the rivers that the tree of life drinks from. Space and time make up reality. Reality is multi-factorial. Like a hive built with complexities that cannot be reproduced. Once it has changed, it cannot be undone.”

“But one can use the aether to change reality again, surely,” Thor argues. Space and time and reality – it all drowns him within its depths. A tsunami of intricacies not made to be understood or comprehended, not even by the gods. 

“Yes, but never to be the same. There is nothing that can be repeated. Chaos is the goddess in charge of us all.” She shoves at him. He staggers back at her strength. “Now get out of my way. I have work to do for the prisoner.”

Before Thor can beg his case, the guards lead Steve Rogers, bound with chains, to the tree. Odin walks behind the prisoner, a great staff in his hand. One of his ravens sits on his shoulder. Thor rushes to his father. “You can’t do this. Thanos changed reality. Just ask Urd or any of the sisters. They know it.”

“As do I, my son.” Odin smiles but it is one that is offered to a child. “This is part of what must be done. He will hang on the tree for nine days and nine nights. If he survives, we will release his sister. If he does not, then his sister will be hung as well. We will take their eyes once they are dead.”

“To what ends?” Thor yells. “Why do this? Are you as mad as the Titan himself? Is it true the stories that you quelled the Nine Realms with slaughter and murder? Tell me All Father where is your mercy now?”

“Why do you care? Who is this man to you?” Odin points to the Commander of the Black Order as his guards strip him down, leaving him naked save for his under garment. 

“He’s willing to give up his eye, both eyes. He’s willing to do this, to hang on Yggdrasil to save his sister. He won’t give up his other sister! Father don’t you see? His capacity for love and faith is beyond that of what we know of Thanos. There is good. I believe he is a good man.”

Odin considers him, his single eye sharper than a knife. “But you have no proof. All you know is what he’s told you.”

“All I know is what I see. He would do anything for his sister. It says the world to me, since my brother would rather see me dead then save me with his own life.” 

Odin scowls at him. “You know nothing of family.” He turns and then slams down his staff. “Hang him!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much...next up...Steve suffers so prettily, doesn't he???


	3. The World Tree

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve suffers the wisdom of the world tree.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks all for your patience. I have been sick for the better part of 2 weeks (or the worse part). I am still slowly getting better. I wanted this chapter to be a little longer, but that's okay. I think it works with this ending. Thank you and enjoy!

CHAPTER 3

They gave him a gift. 

The moment they moved him to Nebula’s prison cell, parts of Steve – the human parts – relaxed. Seeing her, knowing she was safe and filled with the rage that always consumed her made Steve want to celebrate, to smile, to laugh, to cry. It was all he wanted, all he longed for, was to know his sister was safe. 

As he hangs on the tree of life and the strange creatures they called the Norns ladled a glowing liquid onto its roots, Steve thanks whatever deity might still exist in this pitiful world for giving him that last gift. His one wish though is to last the nine days the All Father condemned him to Yggdrasil. 

When Odin passed his sentence, he told his son, the Prince of Asgard, “I hung upon the branches of Yggdrasil, pierced through with my spear for nine days until I understood the wisdom of the Runes.”

“He is not an Asgardian. He is not Aesir. To do this is to condemn him to death,” Thor said. “You haven’t even offered him a trial to defend himself.”

“What I offer him is far better than a trial, my son.”

It ended then. The guards jostled Steve to the tree and the Norns huddled around their vat. One of the Norns went to the base of the tree and tapped on it as if they were touching keys to a console. Runes reflected on her face as she worked. Steve never got a good sight of it, because the other two Norns had hauled down branches from Yggdrasil that twisted like serpents. The world tree lived and breathed differently than any other tree that Steve had ever seen in his life. 

Steve refused to fight, even as the guards taunted him. They jeered as they positioned him against the tree, striped down only to his under garments. All the while they mocked him while the one named Thor seethed in the background. He called to them to stop, but even when they had listened to their master, their hands were cruel. 

Once Steve felt the rough bark against his back, his artificial eye streamed the data about the contact. It told him the composite of the bark, the strange organic living matter. The eye likened it to a sentinel being rather than only a garden ornament. As Steve stared up at it, the tree reached far into the heavens. How high it was, Steve couldn’t fathom.

Even as he struggles against the grip of the tree now, Steve’s eye feeds him the data. When the guards and the Norns chained him to the tree, it seemed like a simple thing to live through, to find a way to survive so that his sister would be free. But the branches like serpents slithered and slipped around his body, lifting him up into the branches so that he hung precariously over the boiling vat that the Norns used to feed the tree. 

It was Thor who stopped it. “For pity’s sake! He’s not a wild boar to be roasted. Stop this madness.”

The Norn called Urd snickered and waved at the sentinel tree. It trembled and then like a mother grasped Steve to its trunk, too high up for anyone to reach him and too far for him to jump without injury if he happened to get free. The creeping branches of the tree had secured him around his waist, at his wrists, and at his feet. He wasn’t truly hung but tangled in the tree.

Now Steve waits. It has been hours since they hung him to Yggdrasil, but the Prince of Asgard and his father still linger at the base. They speak with the Norns as if they are conferring on an important task. This is not the first time in Steve’s life he’s been a piece of meat for others to bargain over – it always been this way. He doesn’t expect mercy or compassion. No clemency can be given to a man who has participated in the crimes of the galaxy. If he suffers for both Nebula and for himself, then he will have found some peace within him.

From below, Odin calls up to him. His voice booms under the shelter of the tree. “Commander of the Black Order, Son of Thanos, Scourge of the Outer Worlds, and Demon of the Nine Realms, how do you plea?”

It seems nonsensical that Steve would be asked after he’s been bound to the tree of life. He clears away the blood dripping down the back of his throat due to his implants. He knows what his answer has to be. It doesn’t matter what the truth is. It only matters who he can save. 

“Guilty.” 

He hears a gasp but ignores it. There is a gentle sigh and finally the words he awaits, “Then so be it. Commander of the Black Order, Son of Thanos, you are sentenced to nine days on the world tree. Here you will seek forgiveness and you will seek the truth. If Yggdrasil finds you worthy, you will see all of the possibilities and the truths laid out before you. If Yggdrasil finds you lacking, you will succumb to the tree and you will be but fodder for its roots. May the souls of Valhalla be with you.”

At that Odin slams his staff into the soil feeding the tree of life and a shudder rolls the ground. Steve glances down at the ground where Thor and his father stand near the Norns’ vat. The fire light flickers across the Prince of Asgard’s features, revealing a grimace of pain and sympathy. Who is this prince, this demigod, to offer Steve any compassion? He doesn’t want it and tears his gaze away. 

His artificial eye reads out the motions of the tree. A fall of data blocks Steve’s vision long enough for him not to glimpse the long finger like projections from Yggdrasil growing from the bindings around his wrists. Steve only realizes they are there when he feels them slide across his human shoulder. He jerks in his bindings but cannot get away as the branches spread upward on his throat and then curl around his ears and temples.

His artificial eye warns about a breach. Steve yanks at the branches holding him firmly to the trunk of the tree, but then he thinks on Nebula and quiets. The branch fingers pause in their exploration of his head and temples. Gritting his teeth, Steve holds his body still. He knows how to do this. He’s done it so many times for Thanos.

_“Be still my child or I may slip.”_

The words echo in his head and tears gather in his one human eye. The branches exploring his face and neck pause and then begin to wiggle, only slightly, as if finalizing their placement on his head and temples. Steve clenches his teeth, grappling against his bonds. Will the branch around his throat choke him as the other branches holding him to the world tree loosen and fall away? His eye responds to his query, giving him statistics on probabilities as well as how long he will be alive before the noose finally ends his life. It assures him it will continue to exist even after he is terminated. Part of him can hear his step father laughing in the distance.

_”You were always a weak thing. A worm not worth my time.”_

His eye replays the mad Titan staring down at him as the knife sliced away at Steve’s body, ruining him, peeling away the last layers of his worth. He can’t get away from the replay. Even closing his eyes does nothing. Blood drips down his nostril and onto his upper lip, so he concentrates on it. Like a tiny river, he follows its path as the branches still on his neck and face.

Nine days. All he needs to last is nine days. The blood stains his lips and he licks it away. It tastes like metal, a reminder of what he is now. Not human. Not robot. A sacrifice of parts. 

Without ceremony the branches cradling his head pierce through his skin. Steve muffles a cry and from below, he hears a slight rasp of disgust and protest. He doesn’t listen to it. He can’t. The pain astounds and he gulps for air, wishing the mad Titan had killed him, or the Outrider beasts had done the job and devoured him all the many times he hid from them. The thin needles of the branches stab through him setting nerves on fire and causing the blood from his nostril to pour down his face. He cannot stop the sounds as he weeps for the agony coursing through him.

A voice steady and true says, “Do not fight it. Yggdrasil, the world tree, the tree of all life, communes with you. If you fight it, then it will kill you.”

Steve tries to settle, tries to calm his nerves as the branches invade his neurons, as they crawl under his skin. A flood of data covers his visual field as his artificial eye reports out the progress of the branches. The pain throbs through him, and he can barely read the information. Pain became a companion during the many years Thanos tormented him. Steve had gathered it to him like a shield, holding on to its presence as living proof that he still existed, still lived, still had worth. Yet now the pain symbolizes every part of him poisoned by the monster, Thanos. It recalls those long, dark days hanging in a torture chamber, being abused, or it harkens back to the last moments in the freezer when the cold would turn to warmth and he would find a dementia in the ice. 

He screams.

His eyes won’t close and the flood of information from his implant screeches back to him. 

_Foreign organic lifeform detected. Infection: unknown. Blood-brain barrier broken. Brain matter contaminated._

In his brain, the world tree, Yggdrasil, infects his brain. His body jerks and judders like a dying fish on a fishing line. He flops against the bark and feels it cutting into his back. The branches wind around him and split open skin. His eyes flutter as the agony of the invasion grows worse. 

_System processing defense options. Verify protocol rescue._

Through the haze of pain, Steve forces the words out of his mouth, because he’s not sure he will be able to form the thoughts without voicing the statement. “No. No authoriz-No.” He coughs up blood. “No authorization.” He spits out the last word like a curse. He cannot have the artificial intelligence embedded in his eye – limited as it is – call out for his sister to help him. He will not put her in danger. All the years he spent locked in the freezer, or in the barns with the Outriders, Steve never initiated the rescue protocols that would call Nebula to his side. 

Never.

He would never put her in a dangerous position. He’d done it enough times. 

She may have asked him to forsake his unspoken oath to his mother by committing to a path of vengeance and violence, but his sisters Nebula and Gamora were the two reasons he crawled out of his pit of self-pity and managed to stand up, straight and tall, every time. Their presence over the years supported him so that he could live up to his mother’s hopes and dreams. 

When the Asgardian guards brought him to Nebula’s cage, allowed him to enter, Steve knew immediately they were seeking information. Everyone dismissed and under-estimated Nebula. The Asgardian motives were clear to her as well. When they closed off the force field, she didn’t run to him, didn’t grab him, or hold him. Their embrace, tight and intimate, happened with only a quiet gaze shared between them. It was more than he could ask and everything to lend him the strength he needed. Nebula folded her legs and sat on the floor, never speaking to him. He followed her lead as he’d done so many times, so many days in the past.

Sitting cross legged in front of her, Steve cupped her beautiful face – a face that had still the traces of childhood haunting it. She did the same and he wondered what hell she found there. Their artificial eyes locked onto one another, sharing streams of data, and allowing them to communicate without a word.

_If you get the chance, then you have to escape._

She frowned at him. _You would do that, ask me to leave. You think I’m going to leave you here to these weak puppets of Odin?_

He wanted to laugh at the image, and he shared that thought with her. A little levity in their situation. She shushed him. _My leg isn’t functioning correctly. Our mad father didn’t repair it right. I can’t run. You need to go if you get the chance._

_Where? To whom?_

_Gamora._

A tide of anguish flowed out of her, the data synthesized her feelings and shared it with him. It washed over him like a great wave of sorrow and anger mixed into one. Steve softened his reaction, because he never understood how his two sisters could allow the mad monster that held all three of them to come between them. But then again, the tortures bestowed upon him by Thanos were all Steve’s own doing. For Nebula it had always been her failing against Gamora, or had been as a punishment for saving Steve from the dirtier jobs as Commander of the Black Order. 

The guilt rolled upward until he could taste it. He hadn’t stopped the feelings from washing over him, from being shared with her. 

_Don’t be stupid. I did it because I wanted to._

He never believed her. _Why didn’t you hate me like you hated Gamora?_

She said nothing. She kept her secrets, her emotions tightly held, but Steve knew. Instantly he knew. She needed someone, something to love. Whether or not Steve had been the correct person to pick, or why she picked him, he would never know, but he was entirely grateful. The love he felt for his sister poured out of him. Nebula’s expression softened.

_You go,_ he’d said. _If you get the chance, you go. Don’t you worry about me. I’ll get out of here. One way or another._

_Gamora?_ Even through the mechanics of her eyes, Steve still saw the pain. He nodded to her. 

They had stayed focused on one another long after their conversation ended. They sat touching, holding their gaze for hours. They had shared a lifetime of pain and love, and then they knew once Nebula found her way out, which she would Steve had no doubts, they would never see one another again. Even though their eyes might connect over some distance, the stars were too far, and she would be out of range before she even left the planet. 

As he hangs on the tree with the branches invading his nervous system, Steve brings to light the connection he has with Nebula, with both sisters. He sees Gamora play out before him, sees her as a young girl holding his hand as he cries into the night for his mother. He watches as she bends over him, after a sparring exercise and his asthma and weak heart nearly sent him into a death spiral. She stands before him in a kind of muted glory with her accusing features and closed down expression as their father berates him. Steve follows the play before him and then slowly comes to realize that the dance of memories is displayed in ghostly forms in front of him for all of the Asgardians to witness. 

Struggling Steve yanks away at the branches holding him to bound to the tree trunk. They constrict across his chest and he gulps for air. In the distance he hears a booming voice.

“Father, for pity’s sake, don’t do this. These are his private thoughts, memories!”

“In order to know the truth of the convicted, we must witness who they are at heart.”

That drives a dagger firmly into Steve’s heart, more piercing and more agonizing than if Odin had truly sliced into his chest. Who he really is – that is a question that even Steve hates to answer. He played the hero once upon a time, but he also played the villain. The ballet before him turns and darkens as it revives the memories of his time as Commander, as his time as a brother destined to condemn his sister.

Yggdrasil steals his thoughts.

He weeps.

Yggdrasil invades him, transforming his living breath into petrified poison, thickening his pumping blood until he tastes the metal of it in his mouth and it throbbing in his brain. He grows into the tree and it becomes part of him. He sees the lights from the heavens and the fires of Hel. He travels deeper and his soul splits open, revealing all that’s left inside – only a beggar’s feast.

The shadows play out his life like a movie for others to be entertained. It isn’t a play but a curse to him. Every image shames him either with his misdeeds or his lack of deeds. He succumbs to the tree because there’s nothing left of him. He cannot stand, and he cannot show pride or integrity; he never lived up to his mother’s wish for him. 

Before Steve in silent parody he sees the landscape of a battle, the smoldering dead at his feet. He commanded that mission. Nebula was not at his side to run as the scapegoat. He razed the city, forced the surrender of the planet, then did the final order for population to be culled. He remembers standing at the precipice near the city. He had begged his father for mercy. The citizens had given up even before Steve ordered the attack. His father laughed at him. Thanos spoke to him through the memory.

“You have a choice, my dear son. I gave you the power, the strength to be my heir. You have a choice to fulfill that promise or I will gut everything that you love. I will tear her apart in front of you. And I will watch her parts burn as she screams for help. I will level your beloved Earth. It is them or it is Nebula and every pathetic human on Earth.”

He had wanted to kill himself, right then. He wanted to end it all. He didn’t.

He tried a different way.

Steve had ordered the city evacuated and the buildings destroyed. He thought he’d found a way around it. He hadn’t. Ebony Maw had laughed when Steve found out that the orders hadn’t been followed, that the city was annihilated and every living soul lost.

The images play out before Steve like a theater of the macabre. Steve walked through the ruins, saw the broken bodies of the children. The tears stung his eyes and he vomited in a corner near the smoking wreckage. Maw ordered the rest of the bodies incinerated and then told Steve he would be celebrated as a son of Thanos. 

It had been Nebula who had discovered him later that night. Alone in his room ready to end it, she stayed his hand. Told him there was a better way. But he wouldn’t listen. He would never listen. Steve had gone to Thanos and asked for his assignment to Earth, eventually after more missions and more deaths, his hated father relented. 

The maelstrom of his life parades before him, a procession of horror, of defeat, of loneliness, and pain. Steve never wanted pity, but the story unfolds and shows his abasement to all who watched. He flails in his bond. Not wanting to live through all moments again, not wanting to bleed out his debasement and agony at the hands of a father who said it was done all in love. 

Steve doesn’t believe in love. Not really. Not anymore.

He only believes in his sisters.

The world tree stretches out its sentient limbs, reaching further, penetrating deeper into Steve’s unconscious mind. It merges with him. His arteries become tertiary branches, his skin turns to bark, his blood to xylem and phloem, circulatory systems for a tree that’s not a plant, not an ordinary plant at all. A world of life and lives spreads out before Steve. He cannot move, paralyzed, fused into the tree of life itself. He’s left his sisters and the terror of all his life behind as he accepts the fate of the world tree, as it devours the last of vestiges of his human form. 

From the well below that feeds the tree, a glittering play of images appears. Steve sinks into the light, the shining light that bathes him. It welcomes him and he can only share gratitude with it. The light from the well pulses and energizes, becomes part of who he is. Below he hears the Norns with their cackling voices. 

“Yggdrasil gives you nothing but pain. It finds you unworthy. You will be sacrificed to the living beings of the world.”

Steve shivers against the tree, not knowing how it is possible since he’s become one with Yggdrasil. Will it refuse him? Does it refuse him? He recalls all the days locked in a cold cell, freezing time and again with only the warm wishes of a home he never knew, of a mother whose face faded into the distance that time can only offer. 

As he melds into the rings of Yggdrasil, the life he could have lived appears before him. He hears the curses of Urd as the tree plays this out. Her sisters snicker at her, but Steve ignores them, too entranced with the possibilities. He mourns the loss, but Steve cannot stop himself from watching his lost life. As a young child, he’d loved the movies. One of his first memories with his mother had been going to the pictures. They’d gone to his Charlie Chaplin in _The Kid_. He marveled at the story of a little tramp and an orphan. Even as he recalls his delight the pictures materialize before him. His mother in the theater, the silent movie flickering. 

Urd’s sisters, Verdandi and Skuld, laugh at her. “The world tree responds to him! How unworthy can he be if it shows him his life?”

“It is only the past.”

Through Steve’s haze of pain and tragedy, he hears a male voice shout out, “Yggdrasil has not found him unworthy. You must release him, Father!”

The response is lost to Steve as he watches the scene shift. He sees the life he should have had. Frame by frame like a silent movie of old, his life spreads out before him. A young sick boy ready to always protect the innocent as he had tried so many times as a child of Thanos. Yet this story is different. He’s a teenager on Earth. He has a loyal friend. He has dreams and he wants to do what’s right. It all causes him to quake with regret and horror as he hangs on the tree. What has he become under Thanos’ unyielding hands?

The promises of what could have been haunts him. Displayed for all to see, he mourns his life. It shifts to the moments in a World War. Everything spins forward until he suddenly witnesses a life where he lived in different centuries but as a good man, a hero to some, a brother to others, but a good man. 

“All Father, you must see this. You must admit that you were wrong. Yggdrasil does not lie.”

“Yggdrasil is not finished. Watch, my son.”

Steve knows now he was always destined to be a man of action, a man that will change lives. Thanos intervened and changed his life for reasons he cannot imagine. Drifting up from the base of Yggdrasil, the images float amongst new figures. Strange lettering that he cannot read or understand. 

Yet the invasion of his mind, his brain, is not complete. The branches thread further into his neural network. The connections weave through his neurons, becoming part of him. He was once a human, then he was part cyborg, now he is part Yggdrasil. Transformed, the wisdom of the ages flows through him and he sees the shift of time and space. He looks down and he witnesses the Asgardians watching him.

Has it been a hour, a day, a week?

Steve doesn’t know. He comprehends the mobius texture of time, a ribbon of space with infinite sides. The threads sew together as the Norns, goddesses of time to his human brain but a part of the space time continuum itself, transform before him into energy. They become the threads, the fabric. Steve witnesses his part – his original part in the play of life – and sees how it’s been cut, frayed, and destroyed. The only way for him to exist now is within the reality twisted and knotted by Thanos. Steve identifies the split, the detour of his real life to the one that Thanos wove. He sees the stream of the Norns, of Urd and Verdandi, as they fanatically worked to the space time continuum that Thanos so upset back to existence. Skuld, the Norn of the future, captured Steve’s threads and rewove them into Thanos’ lines. They had no choice. If they hadn’t, the ribbon of reality would have disintegrated. Steve knows this now. He doesn’t blame them. 

He blames Thanos.

Steve remembers when his sister, Nebula, asked him to take revenge, to hunt down their mad father and wipe him from existence. He wants to go back to that day and vow to be her partner. Thanos took everything from him, took his destiny, took his fate and mutated it. Like a parasite Thanos devoured Steve’s hopes and dreams, leaving only necrosis and death in his wake. Revenge is a powerful word, but there are times it is deserved.

As the ribbons of time and space flex and spiral around him the Runes clarify. He understands the words, the special wisdom written through the ages by Yggdrasil itself – a world tree but something more. Something unexplainable. It tells him secrets. It warns him. It lures him.

Steve wants nothing else but to be Yggdrasil in those moments. The tree shudders with his acquiesces and Steve hears shouts from below, curses from the All Father.

“He is not worthy! The wisdom of Yggdrasil shouldn’t be shared with the likes of him.”

“You’ve said it yourself, Father, Yggdrasil is the tree of all of life, of knowledge. It is older than us. It knows. You’ve lost, Father. Let him down.”

The imploring words of the stranger, Thor, hit Steve in the chest, cause his still heart to throb and move under the wood of his ribcage. Is he human or is he Yggdrasil? The Runes speak to him. He tries to turn away from the lowly conversations below him, but the voice of the merciful one brings him back.

“He is as much a victim as the dead of Thanos.” It is Thor again, pleading his case – for reasons Steve cannot parse. “Please, All Father!”

“I will see him punished! He has brought ruin to the Realms and the outer worlds. There is no excuse. He had a choice and he made it.”

Even as they argue and fight below him about Steve’s fate, Yggdrasil shows him the truth – shows him the legions of death, led by Odin and his daughter, Hela, the goddess of Death subjugating the Nine Realms. The mighty branches around him sway as the story in the secret Runes plays out. There are no images – just the Runes speaking to him. Steve reads them with fascination and disgust. He has been condemned for lesser crimes.

“Father!” Thor cries out.

There is no answer. 

When Steve blinks away the Runes and focuses on the base of the tree, no one is there. Had he imagined everything? Had he wished for a savior and put this prince Thor in his place? 

The images shared by Yggdrasil dry up and disappear. Steve quakes against the bonds of the tree. Blood drips in a slow current down his nostril and from his mouth. He feels the tightened collar of the branches around his throat. Except for the blood, his lips crack and peel. A profound weakness covers him like the cloak of death. He wishes for death to finally relieve him, but what would that make him? A coward. His mother would never forgive him.

Yggdrasil gives him a gift then. 

She stands in front of him, floating in the air. His mother.

“Ma.” Maybe he says it, maybe he just thinks it. He doesn’t know the difference anymore. 

“Steven.” She’s larger than life, a spirit of unnatural beauty. Her hand reaches out and touches his cheek. It’s rough from years of hard work and scrubbing laundry, dishes – for him. “Steve, I’m here now. I’ve come.” He swears he feels a hand on his face, wiping away tears and blood. “I’ve come.”

“For me?” No one ever came for Steve. He spent his life in a prison with sisters who had been as helpless as himself. 

Her eyes are a crystal blue, bluer than the Belts of Azuria, or the Seas of Sanshanora. He’s never seen such beautiful eyes in all his days. Steve longs to live there, at peace and away from all of the horror and terrible truths. Yet he knows that Yggdrasil has him, has devoured the rest of his soul and there’s nothing left.

“Leave me, Ma.” He’s ashamed of who he is. He doesn’t deserve his mother’s love – not anymore.

“No, I will not.” That tender hand leaves his face and he is all the more bereft for its loss, but then a fierce hand seizes the branches hooked to Steve. A deep voice whispers words to the world tree, “You have forsaken your sacred vow, Yggdrasil, world tree. Your vow to protect all, Yggdrasil, to hold all the wisdom and knowledge of the ages. Yet, you torture! You use this as an excuse to feed your fiendish appetite. You are not an advanced species You are nothing but firewood!”

The arms of Yggdrasil lash out and the phantom of his mother fades until Steve only sees another shadow, heftier, bulkier, larger. The figure swings at the arms and then grabs Steve’s arm, heaving him away from the tree. The fingerlike branch connections to the tree rip away and shred his skin. Steve screams out, not able to stop the agony from encompassing him. He’s lifted from the tree and in the haze of his delirium a flash of lightning lights the sky and a rumble of thunder shakes the ground. Someone else slips under his shoulder, a woman Steve thinks. She’s in silver armor and her long dark hair is braided back out of her face. She supports him as he stumbles and blood leaks from his nostril. He gags but doesn’t look back, doesn’t witness what’s happening to the world tree, the tree that showed him so much of a lost life he mourns.

A rough hand is on his shoulder and he peers over to see Thor standing beside him, the hammer in his hand. Sweat drips off the god of thunder’s face but his eyes draw Steve. Piercing, blue, intense. 

“Come, we have little time. The Norns are not easily distracted with the tapestry of lives,” Thor says. He hauls them forward with what seems like little concern for Steve’s injuries but when Steve staggers and coughs up blood, Thor halts. “Get the great ship, the busser.” 

The lady warrior waits for Thor to take her burden before she departs with a heavy sigh. 

“Do not despair. The busser is a warrior ship. We will go to Freya. She will harbor you.”

Steve wants to protest, wants to ask about his sister’s fate, but the pain from the tree’s invasion overtakes him. It drowns him, pulling him under its weighed cloak until he cannot find a way to breathe or to see. His eyes blur. His lungs seize and constrict. He wonders what it might be like to live in that other life. The one free of this hell. He succumbs to the gravity of his pain, circling inward slowly like a dying comet without any tail to burn in the night sky until he whispers to sleep.

When he wakes again Steve doesn’t immediately open his eyes. He takes full measure of where he is – the feel and smell and thickness of it. Places have densities. He’s learned that over the years. Different planets have slightly different gravities. He feels it in his bones and muscles. He shifts and knows he’s still on Asgard. It is at this time he notices he’s not tied to a tree, not chained in the freezer, or bound by the forcefield as his father works on him. Instead, Steve’s in a bed.

A comfortable bed with soft sheets and warm pillows. Blankets cover him and he doesn’t shiver or quake from the cold. Steve cannot recall the last time he slept in a real bed. His wounds don’t beat in their pain. Only a shallow ache reminds him that he has been injured. The invasion of the world tree’s branches is just a memory to hide away with all of the rest of the horrible images of his past. 

While he keeps his eyes closed, the artificial eye in his left socket switches to active mode when it recognizes his sleep cycle has ended. It streams data to his brain, telling him the temperature of the room, the number of injuries his sustained, the fact that his left leg still needs further repair, and that the serum rejects the facial implant. Those last two injuries are run of the mill. He’s used to them. His body and the serum still work to overcome the damage done by Yggdrasil’s infection of his nerve cells and brain. A headache splits his skull but the fact he’s lying in a bed safe quiets his aching head. Over the review of his status he hears people whispering.

“The All Father shows no mercy. If you think he will be kind to you for taking away his prize, you are very wrong.” A woman’s voice with low undertones as if Autumn speaks about the winter’s cold.

“Prize?”

“Odin sees the Commander as a bargaining chip. Much as he does with the woman robot. He wants Thanos-.”

“Freya, you must realize Odin is not seeing the forest for the trees. Thanos is more powerful than we thought. The Black Order, the infinity stones sets him apart from any other enemy he’s faced. Before Odin faced fools. Now he faces a mad man. There’s a difference.” Steve recognizes the voice as Thor’s and as soon as he does his left eye sends him data on the man, known throughout the worlds as the God of Thunder. 

“Well, you’ve put me at great risk,” Freya says. “My household here on Asgard is not my home, but I’ve come here as a diplomatic gesture. You know that breaking the word of my people will upset the balance in the Nine Realms.”

“The Vanir have always been a reasonable people,” Thor says. “I am sure they will understand.”

Freya’s voice strains like a too early snow storm in the middle of Autumn as she responds. “I’m not sure I understand. He’s the Commander of the Black Order. He’s been a legend for years, and now you give him succor.”

“He was a victim. Stolen from Midgard and tortured. Do you see him? Really see him?” Thor’s whispers rasp and scrape the air. “He and his sister were tortured. We found the data, all of it in Thanos’ fortress.”

Freya is quiet and then says, “You are too soft, Thor. You may have earned that hammer by your fortitude and your courage, but you will lose your heart because of kindness. Hasn’t dealing with your brother taught you anything?” 

Steve hears footsteps leading away and then the opening and closing of a door. He opens his eyes, expecting to be alone only to find Thor standing by his bedside. He remains mute. Questions swirl in his head, a mess of confusion. Part of him wants to close his eyes and feel his hay bed in the Outriders barn stalls. He knew the dangers there. Here he knows nothing. For all of his life he’s been raised to fear and to fight. This monstrous god before him poses the worst threat – the unknown.

Thor steps forward. His features soften as he studies Steve. “How do you feel?”

Steve swallows down the bile of fear. “Why am I here?” The acid in his tone taints the air.

“You could be more grateful. I saved you from the oldest living organism in all of the Realms.” Thor closes his arms around his chest, folding them. It should signal to Steve he’s shut off, but instead it only shows him a slightly more frail person who’s frightened of the consequences.

“Still doesn’t answer my question.” Steve knows he’s treading on thin ice, but he’s never been able to stop himself. Not when it really matters. Thanos would always tell him that he was his own worst enemy.

Thor sighs and drops his arms. “My father, Odin, sentenced you without considering the evidence. I’ve never known him to be so unjust. I tried to reason with him, but it was impossible. I couldn’t allow the world tree to consume you.” He lightly touches Steve’s neck as he leans over the bed, examining the wounds there. It’s at this point, Steve realizes the bed sits high off the floor with its massive headboard and large bedstead. Thor only needs to bend slightly to touch Steve, to gently shift his chin to examine the injuries on his neck. “Yggdrasil exacts a terrible price.”

Steve decides to attack the problem a different way. “Your father won’t be pleased.”

“No, he won’t. I seem to keep on disappointing him.” 

“Well, we have that in common,” Steve mutters while realizing he’s admitting that he does see Thanos as a fatherly figure. It hollows out a part of him, makes him vast and open and empty of anything human. Maybe he’s not human anymore. He glances at his mechanically enhanced hand, feels the rigidity of the left side of his face. 

“He wasn’t your father,” Thor states. 

For some reason, Steve sees the Asgardian as fresh air in a stifling room, a hot wind in the cold day. “But why did you save me?”

“I did what was right.” Thor nods his head as if trying to convince himself. “Now, we have to decide what to do with you. You can’t stay here, not forever. It puts Freya in more danger.”

“I won’t be a danger to anyone anymore,” Steve vows. 

“Well, for now, you will rest. My lady Freya has given you refuge here. Odin will not trespass. This hall is considered part of Vanir and therefore she is free to accept who she will on her territory. Though if the All Father catches wind of it, as you Midgardians say, he will have my ass.” 

Steve cannot help but smile. The firm and formal way that Thor said it but with the slightest of humor in his eyes, eases Steve’s tensions. “Is that how they say it there? I haven’t been back in a while.”

“From what I gather over seventy years, my friend.” Thor pulls a chair over to the side of the ornate bed. The chair with its lion paw arms and carved back matches the bed. “If I understand it well enough. You were on Earth for some time after you were abducted, were you not?”

Steve pushes up and adjusts the pillows. It hurts just to move and when he sniffles Thor hands him a tissue for the blood leaking from his nostril. “Yes. I went to Earth to retrieve the Tesseract, one of the infinity stones that Thanos seeks.”

“And you made quite a name for yourself. From my friends on Midgard, you were called the First Avenger, Captain America.”

“How do you know?” Steve’s voice is hushed as if he speaks in church. Speaking any louder would destroy the myth.

“I’ve been to Earth many times now. I know some of their legends, yours in particular.” Thor crosses his thick arms across his chest. “I wonder why you didn’t escape your father’s clutches then?”

Steve laughs and it stabs him, because there is no luxury or joy in his laughter. It is stained with the bitterness of duty. “Because I had a duty.”

“To your father, the mad Titan.”

“No,” Steve stops Thor’s tirade before it even begins. “I did it to stop him. I tried to get rid of the Tesseract once and for all. It dropped into the deepest part of the ocean. It shouldn’t be retrieved.”

“Aye, but it was.” Thor rubs at his beard. “Midgardians are a foolish bunch.”

“They should have left it in the ocean.”

“But they did not. They found it, exploited it, and my wayward brother on a mission from Thanos himself tried to seize it,” Thor says. “Now it sits in Asgard’s vault.”

“Nowhere is safe for it. He’ll know it’s there.” Just knowing the Tesseract was in close proximity to him sends a jolt through Steve, racing his heart and constricting his chest. If Thanos finds him, if he figures out where Steve is – will he be able to hold the truth? Will he be able to protect the secret? “You shouldn’t have told me.” 

“Are you going to run back to your evil father and tell him?” The words interrogate him, but the kind look in Thor’s eyes tell a different story. 

“I hope only to see him when I drive a stake through his heart like the blood sucking villain he is,” Steve seethes as he answers. He should have listened to Nebula. She had been right.

“You are not like the comic book hero they sang about on Earth.” Thor tilts his head as he studies Steve. “While I’ve been to Midgard I’ve learned quite a bit about their lore. Captain America is known for his mercy. Not like the Commander at all.”

“Thanos worked hard to spread lies about me as Commander. He wanted the whole of the known universe to be frightened by the legend. I’m afraid I never lived up to it. I spent the last decades paying for my crime of disobedience.”

Thor waves at Steve. “And this? This is a product of that or are these enhancements something you wanted?”

Enhancements. It sounds like a jewel, something he should crave. But each and every implant Thanos gave him builds his own personal prison. His body transformed into something alien and the very walls of his prison, a jail, a dungeon he can never escape. Steve looks away and shivers. “Not enhancements.” He manages the words, but they stick in his throat with barbs and thorns. “He did it to punish me. He said I was defective.”

Thor considers him. The tenderness dissipates to be replaced by a contemplative expression. “So, tell me, are you? I risked it all to save you. Tell me, did Yggdrasil find you worthy?” 

“Is that for me to judge?” Steve asks. 

“My father went to the world tree seeking wisdom. He learned the Runes of the Realm. It changed everything for him,” Thor says. “You must understand that Yggdrasil is one of the oldest entities in the universe. Older than the Celestials, some say. If Yggdrasil has gifted you with some wisdoms, then it has found you worthy and this will not all be in vain.”

“Do you always take the word of a tree? Don’t you judge for yourself?” 

“This isn’t helping me at all,” Thor says. He walks away from Steve’s bed toward the long window. He stares out, the sunlight on his face brightens his hair to a golden fire. “I took a chance on you. I know you aren’t who the mad Titan says you are. I also know that he searches for the infinity stones. He’s already taken the aether and changed something. I don’t know what! You have to know.”

“So you saved me from the tree for your own purposes,” Steve says as he throws back the warm blankets. Testing his left leg, he balances instead on his right to get out of the bed. With a limp, he walks over to Thor. “I’m used to being used. Why did I think it would be different with you?”

Thor switches his focus from the world outside to Steve. Softly, so softly, he answers, “Is that what you think? Truly?”

The anxiety deflates. “No. But I can’t trust you. I can’t.”

Thor searches his features. “Why would you? You were kidnapped from your world, forced into a servitude that is a nightmare. You have no reason to trust me. I don’t ask you to. What I ask of you only is to help me know how to help you. You must realize that helping you means finding a way to stop him. You won’t be free of him, you and your sisters, without him being neutralized.”

“I know.” Steve tries for vehemence and annoyance but falters in his delivery because of the man before him – his earnestness. 

“Can you? Will you help me?” Thor asks. 

Steve swallows down the fear that has been his companion for all the years since he was abducted from Earth. He feels the confines of his personal prison, the walls of his implants closing in on him, squeezing him. He breaks through with his voice, with the truth. “The tree showed me what could have been. It showed me a life that I should have had.”

“He stole you away to stop that life,” Thor says. The light in his eyes dances with discovery. “It’s true. All of it.”

“What’s true?” Steve asks.

“You’re the key.” Thor grabs hold of Steve’s shoulders, holding him, not recoiling from the touch of his metal shoulder. “Thanos is a vain and terrible man. His vanity will be his undoing.”

For all the times Thanos worked on Steve or on his sister, the idea that Thanos might be vain hadn’t crossed Steve’s mind. He only thought of him as cruel, unjust, evil, and pitiless. “I don’t think he’s vain. He thinks he’s doing the right thing for the universe. Without him, Thanos believes our fate is to be doomed.”

“Isn’t the very definition of vanity that of being enamored with one’s own achievements?” Thor asks. His hands still rest on Steve’s shoulders. It feels not like a weight but like an anchor to different possibilities, a future with hope. “He thinks he’s right, but he won’t consider any other avenue. He is vain and arrogant. He wanted you out of the picture because of your part in the reality he wiped away. I am sure of it.”

“Does it matter now?” Steve says. Part of him flayed away when Thanos peeled his skin off his face and secured artificial bones to his skull. Steve might cling to his mother’s words as a token of what he could have been, but the truth stalks him. The truth of his unworthiness regardless of what Yggdrasil might deem him. 

“Surely it does. He wanted you to suffer because you made him suffer or even lose in the reality he experienced and knows,” Thor says. “It means, he will come after you. It means you are still the key.”

Steve doubts every word Thor says. How can he trust this man, this god? He’s only just admitted to using Steve – possibly for good – but still using him. Yet, when Steve looks at Thor as he stands with his strong hands laying so gently on Steve’s shoulders, he finds not someone to fear, but someone strong of will and someone earnest in his words. The light from the window shines over him like a halo of the heavens and it all becomes to powerful for Steve to digest. He shudders and his left leg falters. He tumbles, but Thor is there. Thor catches him.

“Forgive me,” Thor says as he shifts an arm around Steve’s waist to guide him back to the bed. “I shouldn’t have burdened you so soon after your encounter with Yggdrasil. I’ve never had the courage to survive the world tree. You are injured. I should have known better.”

Steve only shakes his head, but accepts the help back to bed. 

“You must rest now.” Thor guides him back to the bed, shifting the blankets to cover Steve as if he deserves someone to take care of him. “I will have Freya’s staff come and check on you. She has a healer who may be of assistance. Later, we will speak some more.”

Thor moves off but Steve catches him. “Thor?”

He stops, looking over his shoulder.

“Thanos will come for the Tesseract. He will come if he knows it’s here.”

“He doesn’t know it’s here,” Thor says but then he turns to Steve. “He will know that you’re here. You and your sister. He’ll come for you.”

Steve gets up on his elbows, though the energy to get out of the bed escapes him. “Then I’ll leave. We’ll leave. Just give us a ship and we’ll be out of here.”

Thor’s expression hardens, stone and ice. “I’m counting on him coming for you. I won’t let him hurt you or your sister.” He chews on it for a moment before adding, “You are right though. He’ll come too soon. We’re not ready just yet. I have some plans to make. I have some information to gather.” He touches Steve’s mechanically enhanced hand. “Rest, my friend. You will need your strength.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next up -- some healing and some comfort before the shit hits the fan! :)


	4. Souls of the Past

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thor tries to find a connection to Steven.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wanted to say that I've taken a lot of liberties about the timelines and movies that are in the MCU. So if you are looking for a direct movie by movie replay - that's not what's going to happen. I've kind of smashed a bunch of them together and changed up the sequence of events to fit my plot.

The gardens of Freya’s hold ripple with the winds of a new Spring. Soon it would be time for the children of Asgard to run the fields and pick wildflowers, to make bouquets and crowns for their mothers and fathers. Thor had taken part in the Vår festivals as a child. He’d loved to weave the crowns for his parents. While Loki always dazzled with his flower crowns adorn with magical birds, Thor had worked tirelessly to fashion bouquets that symbolized the beauty of Asgard and the Realms. He recalls one particular bouquet he made to resemble Yggdrasil itself. His mother had treasured it. Now he is estranged from his parents. Lost in the middle of a war that hadn’t been declared just yet. 

As he walks the pathways of the garden Thor hears the caws of Freya’s falcons as they circle overhead. If they are close, then it means that she is not far away. Thor heads in the direction of the birds and, once they spot him, they zero down to their mistress. She sits on a stone bench, waiting for him. She is one of the most beautiful women he’s ever seen. 

She braided her flaxen hair in an intricate weave that reminds him of a tiara. Flowers decorate each twist and curve of her hair. Her eyes are both blue and green playing with the colors like the oceans. Her skin is like cream and, when she stands to her full height, she dwarfs men with her regal stature. She had once been Odin’s obsession, but she refused his advances. To this day Frigga hasn’t forgiven his father. Freya and Frigga though are the greatest of friends, both sharing the gift of Seidr, Asgardian magic. Although Frigga befriended Freya, the latter had always favored Thor and despised Loki. Thor never knew why and never pressed the point.

As she catches sight of him, Freya stands and her falcons alight on her shoulders. Her dress has leather shoulders to protect her from their long talons. The large birds would be dangerous for anyone other than Freya. He’d heard they’d been known to pluck the eyes out of threats to their mistress.

“Thor, you can be quite naïve at times,” Freya says and points to the bench. 

He accepts it and the birds hop over to a stone wall not far from the bench. They eye him with silent contempt. “I did what had to be done.”

“You know nothing of this Commander,” Freya says and folds her long fingers into the drape of her wide sleeves. “I’ve heard many things about this Commander of the Black Order.”

“Over the last decades he was tortured by Thanos. He hadn’t even been off of the planet we found him on in seven decades,” Thor says. “I can give you the data – you can check it in the forge yourself.”

She raises a hand to stop him. “I don’t argue with you. I am telling you what others are saying and are going to say. They will wonder if you have betrayed Asgard for Thanos.” 

“That’s preposterous!” Thor wants to jump up and pace, but he forces himself to stay put, to watch the gentle sway of the wildflowers and the daffodils in the wind. 

“You need to have a clear message. Get it out to the Warriors Three. They will be your best conduit to the rest of Asgard,” Freya says. “I am not here to judge Asgardians, but I am here to say that I see no good coming of facing down your father on a whim. You have evidence of their torture – both this Commander and the woman. But do you have evidence of brother’s and sister’s mercy? Do you have evidence of who they are? Of why they are worth saving?”

Thor bows his head. He doesn’t, of course. He would have to travel to some of the different worlds known to have been razed by the Commander some seventy years ago. He knows of the good Steven did as Captain America on Earth from his Midgardian brethren, the Mightiest Heroes. But he knows nothing more than that. Could that give him the evidence he needs? Could he use it to support saving Steven and his sister?

“Why do you go so strongly against your father?”

Even to Thor his answers feel vague and petty. “My father has been dishonest with me. I wonder how the magic of Mjolnir finds him worthy, I wonder how Yggdrasil finds him worthy when he lied about Loki.”

“Loki was a special case,” Freya says but doesn’t explain. “I think you should ask the Norns. They know more than they like to admit.”

“The Norns will not think too kindly on me when they discover my treachery.” He doesn’t consider what he did as treacherous or treasonous. It was the right thing to do. If he could have, he would have found a way to release Steven’s sister, Nebula, as well. 

“Well, maybe not the Norns then, but maybe Heimdall. He sees all,” Freya says and her birds caw at her. She waves to them as if she disregards their opinions. “Talk with Heimdall. Find out what you seek about your father.”

It puzzles him, her urging him to dig deeply into his father’s past deeds. “What are you not telling me Freya?”

“As an outsider here, it is not my place to say. You may well need to speak directly with Odin.” Freya stands. The falcons flutter around her, circling but focusing on Thor as if he is their prey. “Your charge may stay here as long as you need, but don’t test my patience Thor.”

Thor stands and nods. “I will not.” Before she leaves him, he says, “You have a soul forge?”

Freya turns and smiles. “Of course, I am well versed in these arts.”

“Would you – could you use it on Steven? He’s ill and I am not certain he can heal without considerable help.”

Freya studies him before answering. A cold wind reminds him that winter is only just whispering away. “I can try. It was my understanding that Eir has already tried to help him.”

Thor grimaces. It’s true. Eir had already done what she could for Steven. “You may have more luck?”

“You are trying to compliment me,” Freya laughs. “It’s not working, but surely I will try.” She bows slightly and then leaves, the falcons squawking at him before they follow her. 

Thor watches her leave and then stands in the garden at a loss. He can’t go back to the palace. His father will be enraged at Thor’s disobedience. Contacting Heimdall does seem like the best thing to do. Maybe Freya is looking out for him as well. With renewed purpose, Thor goes to the rooms Freya offered to him. Using the Asgardian communications forge would be foolish and only lead Odin to Thor’s haven. Yet, he needs to contact Heimdall without being observed. It shouldn’t be too hard.

He sits on the settee nearest the windows overlooking the gardens and closes his eyes. The chilled breeze prickles his skin as Thor calls out in his mind. _Heimdall, see me_.

After a moment, the breeze warms and Thor opens his eyes to see Heimdall standing before him. He knows by instinct that his friend is nowhere near the Vanir estates. He is insubstantial but very real to Thor. “Heimdall.”

“Tell me what you seek. Your father is not to be reckoned with today.”

“How angry is he?”

“He threatened to call Mjolnir to him, to banish you. To let loose the hounds of Hel.”

“That’s serious,” Thor says and smiles at his friend as the lurking pride flourishes on his face. “You support my efforts.”

“I have seen more than you know,” Heimdall says. “Yggdrasil does not lie. The Midgardian, called the Commander, has worth enough that the world tree spoke to him. I consider this a recommendation of the highest order.”

“And my father doesn’t agree?”

Heimdall cocks a brow at him. “Threatened to hack Yggdrasil down and feed it to the dwarves’ fires.”

Thor sighs. “Then we must move quickly.”

“What is your plan?” Heimdall’s eyes look like mirrors and Thor wonders what he sees.

“I must get the Commander ready to travel first,” Thor says. “He’s not well. Too many years of mistreatment.”

“Yes, I know,” Heimdall says. 

How must it to be know all the ills of the worlds around them? How must it be to see the ugliness of races as they struggle toward their inevitable downfall. “Can you tell me about his other sister? Or Nebula?”

“Odin hasn’t threatened her, just yet, if that’s your worry. Frigga is working her best to keep him in his right mind.” Heimdall’s image fades. “I don’t have much time. What is it you need, Son of Odin?”

“I need to know what Odin is hiding. Why did Yggdrasil think him worthy of the tree’s knowledge? Odin lied about Loki. What’s going on that I don’t know?” Thor asks.

Heimdall frowns. “Rooting around in the past is not a wise thing to do. Your father had his reasons for what he did. He’s worked tirelessly to prevent Ragnarok all these long years. It would do you well to remember that.”

“You’re saying the company line,” Thor says, parroting words he’d heard on Midgard one of the many times he visited. 

“I don’t lie. He has worked to avoid Ragnarok, but it closes in.” Heimdall shrugs his massive shoulders. “There are some things that are not avoidable. Right now, Thor, get your new friend well. I will do what I can to ward off your father. After that, we will speak again.”

Heimdall fades leaving Thor in the twilight of the day as he contemplates what his next move should be. With too much to consider, Thor decides the best avenue for today would be to check on his charge and discuss how Steven would like to proceed. After all, Steven has free will and Thor shouldn’t trespass on it. 

Freya’s falcons fly overhead, ever the watchful keepers of their goddess’ keep. Thor notes they eye him but, growing up under the wing of his father’s ravens, makes it easy to shrug off their silent warnings. He hurries across the estate, though, because he finds himself anxious to see Steven again, to talk to him, and to give him ease in his recovery. When Thor thinks of what he’s witnessed on the data streams that they recovered from Thanos’ fortress a fist grips his chest and squeezes his heart. How could one soul endure so much? A human soul, not one from Asgard, but a frail human with their short lives that burn out so quickly – a bright light extinguished with the smallest of breezes. Thor admits to no one but himself that the Commander of the Black Order intrigues him. Not only for his perseverance against such horrible odds, but his persistence. Thor can’t be sure he would have endured the long years of torture without breaking. 

Had Thanos broken Steven?

Not according to the data streams. The horror contained within the data spheres taken from the fortress haunts Thor. Getting past the surgical experimentation had been difficult for Thor and for his companions, but then searching the data streams for more in depth knowledge – to confirm or disprove everything that Steven had confessed. Those facts horrified and revealed the ugliest of all sentient beings. Long ago, Thor came to realize that sentient beings balanced on the precipice between greatness and cruelty. More often than not they dropped into the abyss where brutality and malice lived. Steven had lived a life without mercy, yet he still persisted.

Before Thor sought out his recovering charge, he heads to the data forge. Luckily Freya had given him access to the large catacombs of rooms under the main keep. The catacombs aren’t for the dead but are a collection of forges that grew into the earthen walls of the underground. Gnarled roots cradle the forges and network across the floor making for a difficult pathway to get to the forge he seeks. The branches form archways for each of the different forges, separate areas to study and to create. Most of the forges Freya possessed were designed for the healing arts as well as the arts of battle and war. Her expertise in combat had been one of the reasons Odin kept her close. She may not be an Asgardian, but Odin’s wisdom ensured her allegiance. Just allowing Thor to be within her estate puts their alliance in jeopardy. He knows it, and Thor knows he must take every caution to protect Freya’s confidence in him.

When he gets to the forge, Thor sweeps away the cobwebs. They aren’t truly webs but a fine silky barrier that secures the forge. Only someone with the accepted physical and mental imprint would be allowed to use the forge. The great branches shudder at the intrusion and it takes a few moments before he’s recognized. The forge lights up, reddish orange lines crisscrossing the bed of information lights up. Thor knows his father’s codes, how he protects and shields his own forges. It is said the branches and roots that encompass the most precious forges are actually offshoots of Yggdrasil itself. If that’s true, then Thor’s quest might be over before he’s begun.

The knotted vines seem to inhale and then quaver in release as Thor queries more information, all of the information on what was done to Steven by Thanos and his ungodly order. If Freya is to heal him, then she must know what’s been done to her patient. Surely, the outer damage is plain but the inner, secret harm may not be as easy to discern. 

The Mad Titan has always been known to be as efficient as he is cruel. Now, as Thor studies his archives and records, he understands him to be as meticulous in record keeping as he’s been in his destruction. Thor shifts through the latest information. How Steven was modified, what happened under the monstrous hand of his father isn’t what Thor wants to know. He searches deeper, longer into the past. Darker into the past – a boy stolen from Earth. A specific boy. A chill runs up his spine, the arc of lightning could never warm him from the frigid ice in his veins. Thor needs to know more, but here the files are not as complete. It is as if even Thanos comprehended that this path he tread may be cursed and so he covered it, hid it even from himself by not recording it. All he finds from the files is that Thanos wanted Steven Rogers. His horde of demons, the Black Order, went to Earth – century ago. They stole him away, even as he cried out for his mother. The one called Proxima Midnight captured the boy, brought him in front of Thanos. The historical record showed images of a boy, thin – a reed of a boy – with pale skin and eyes blue like the sky. He knelt in front of Thanos – the massive Titan who would become the boy’s nightmare. He didn’t cower, not in that first moment. He didn’t cry. Steven stared defiantly at his kidnapper, at his fate. 

Much later, in the record, Thor finds evidence of the boy’s will cracking. His abuse curdles Thor’s blood, brings into question Thor’s own ability to stomach the details. The fetishes of the Black Order and their god bring bile to Thor’s mouth and he pushes it away. He grips the edge of the forge, the vines of the cradle whispering a shudder against his strength but warning all the same. Stepping back, Thor closes his eyes and wonders at the malice of sentient beings. What mercy is there in awareness when it means a certain cowardice that breeds fear and hatred. He leaves the forge then, with the bleeding red of the interface. Maybe it is his own cowardice, maybe his bravado fails him. He leaves and makes his way back through the catacombs and up through to the chambers of the estate until he’s standing at the doorway to Steven’s room again. 

Shaking his head, he cannot enter. He’s seen too much in the forge. Knows the horrors of a child’s life and the broken soul it must have created. What he may have seen in the few interactions he’s had with Steven so far must have been in his head. Instead of entering, Thor goes to the rooms assigned to him by Freya. He beds down like he’s on a quest, not on the bed but on the balcony of the rooms. He needs to feel the sweep of the stars and know the potency of the universe. He needs to know that life it not a ruin of wishes never to be fulfilled. How could a boy survive what they did to him? What matter of a man does it make? Why does Thor’s heart stir when he thinks of the man? He saw the man hang upon the tree of wisdom and the realms. He saw the man defeat it and the tree reveal truths. He witnessed the integrity of the man – so maybe, just maybe he’s not broken, but something more.

When morning comes again, Thor leaves his suite of rooms and heads directly to Steven’s room. A guard stands by the door and Thor halts in his tracks. Just yesterday the door had been free – a conveyance to come and go, the guest not a prisoner. He turns the corner and clears his throat. The guard straightens to attention.

“Lord,” the guard says. His eyes stay unfocused.

“Why has your ladyship placed a guard on her guest’s room?” Thor forces the fear down, that Freya has betrayed him, and Odin alerted to their presence here.

“Her ladyship is within and wishes for you to enter when you are ready.”

That is no direct answer, but Thor will have to accept it. He itches for his hammer, but it is safely in his suite here. It wouldn’t be right for him to walk the halls of this sanctuary with it, but now Thor feels the loss of it. He nods to the guard and steps through the door as the guard opens it. Instead of a flock of his father’s loyal royal guard, he finds only Freya smiling at Steven.

At a table near the bay of windows, Freya and Steven partake in feast to break their fast. Laid before them are plates of the most worthy dishes. Rye bread and cheese on a platter with a few different varieties of jam, pickled herring, smoked salmon, and a number of fruits in bowls are offered for their meal. In addition, there are drinks of juices, milks, and Thor’s newest favorite that he brought back from Midgard and shared amongst the gods, coffee. 

Freya sees him and waves for him to enter and join them. “Come, come. Dear Steven has told me of his love of the arts.” Her falcons squawk right outside on the adjacent balcony. “I thought today would be a good day for him to see the gallery I have in the north wing of the estate.”

“Is that wise?” Thor asks and checks on Steven before he settles into a seat on Steven’s right side. “Are you well enough to walk the halls?”

Steven sniffles and holds a linen cloth to his nostril. When he takes it away, Thor glimpses the blood stains. He hides it under the table. “I’m not sure that I’ll ever be what you would call well enough. But I would really love to see the art. I haven’t touched a pencil or paper in years.”

The memories of what was done to the child percolate up to the surface of Thor’s consciousness. The pain under the words so evident it hurts like a pressure on Thor’s chest. “Perhaps we can get you some supplies?”

Steven smiles a bit and then looks at the breads and fish. He doesn’t touch them. 

“You may have whatever you want to eat,” Thor offers and, when Steven doesn’t move, he picks up the plate and loads it with a number of different fishes, breads, and cheese as well as some fruit. “Eat; you cannot get strong if you don’t eat.”

Freya gives a knowing glance to Thor. “I’ve been telling him he is most welcome to anything I have.”

“Though you put a guard at his door,” Thor states and at that Steven drops his fork and places his hands under the table.

“For his protection,” Freya replies. With a slight gesture over his shoulders to her falcons, Freya notes, “My familiars have reported to me that there was a disturbance at the palace last night. Some say that the woman escaped.”

“The woman?” For a moment Thor doesn’t track.

“Nebula, my sister,” Steven says and there’s no cowardice or mewling now. There’s defiance and a thrill of victory in the man’s eyes. “She will never be held again. She’s escaped our father’s torment. She runs to freedom. It would be wise for you to let her go.”

“But will she not come for you?” Freya asks. She points to his plate. “Please eat. It is a waste of food otherwise.”

That sets something off in Steven and he picks up his fork and dives into the food. After he finishes the pickled herring with a slight greenish look to his face, Steven answers, “No. I told her to go.”

“You told her?” Thor asks and he grips the carafe of coffee. “You speak to her?”

“If the network is clear, we can.” Steven taps the side of his face. “Though we have to be careful to ensure our father doesn’t watch.”

“You knew she would escape.” Thor doesn’t ask, he doesn’t have to, the answer is plain and clear. 

“I knew.” The defiance stands. He isn’t backing down and part of Thor relishes it. To see this spark of life in the man shows Thor that there is still hope. “He won’t. He really doesn’t even realize that we hacked the interface and can communicate with each other on a rudimentary intranet. He doesn’t realize it. We stay quiet as mice when we know he’s looking.”

“Can he track you to here?” Freya asks.

Steven considers the question and then tilts his head in confirmation. “Probably. We’ve been trying to scramble the signal so he might not be able to do it. But it takes a lot of concentration.”

“So you can deliberately deceive him,” Thor asks. 

“We try. We’ve always tried. Many think of my sister as an evil person, as a villain. I can tell you she is the farthest from that. When I couldn’t-.” He swallows down the words and blinks several times. He has to bring the linen up again to wipe away the blood leaking from his nostril. “When I couldn’t preform my duty for our father, she did it in my stead. It ripped apart her soul. Don’t believe she is just parts. She’s more than that.”

Thor reaches out and grips the man’s hand. “She’s your sister. I have some understanding of a sibling who sometimes helps and other times befuddles me.”

“No. You don’t get it.” Steven withdraws his hand from the contact. “She did the deeds I couldn’t, though it hurt her. I can see it in the interface. How much it took out of her, but she still did it. She still killed in my father’s name for me. Who holds that sin? Tell me, you’re the god here. Tell me, who holds the sin? Nebula who traded her soul to save me, or me? I allowed her to take on the burden of murder so that I could remain free of it.” He gives a little joyless laugh. “Didn’t work. They still haunt me. All the souls dead because I couldn’t stop him.”

“You were a boy.”

“A century ago I was a boy!” Steven says and slams his fist on the table. “I vowed to be a good man. I can never be one now. I once held a shield, a symbol of hope and freedom and righteousness, but I can never hold it again. I’m dirty with it. Filthy. You don’t get it. I can never be anything more than what he made me!”

Freya looks at Thor, waiting for him to say something. He’s at a loss but for one thing. “Yggdrasil showed you the wisdom of the ages. Found you worthy. I would say that’s good enough for me.”

Steven scoffs. “Yggdrasil tormented me with truths. I don’t call that an honor, I call it a judgement.” He shoves his chair from the table. “I’m grateful to you for saving me, for taking me from my false father’s fortress and then from saving me from the tree, but don’t ask me to forget what happened. Don’t ask me to forget who I am, what I’ve become. Don’t ask me to forgive myself. Because I know what a good man is and it’s not me.”

The falcons flutter on the balcony. They caw in response while Freya shifts her gaze between Thor and Steven. She waits like one of the birds of prey that always guard her. 

“And if I am such a good man, tell me really why is there a guard on my door? Am I prisoner here?”

“No, you’re not a prisoner,” Thor manages to force out. The tirade startles him, but part of him wants to celebrate. It is one of the first sparks of life he’s seen in the man since his rescue. “Right, my lady Freya?”

“As I said, the guard is more for your protection. Once I heard of your dear sister’s escape, I knew I had no choice. Odin has Heimdall as his eyes. He will search for you; he will search for his son.” She points to Thor as she lounges back in the chair. While Freya always presents a wise and quiet demeanor, Thor senses a darker essence of who she is. 

Thor drops his gaze. “It is the truth. My father will seek me out. He will eventually ask Heimdall, but I hope my friend will give us the space we need for you to heal.”

“Then I am endangering you. I think, if you will allow it, I should leave.” Steven climbs to his feet, which is no easy task considering his faulty leg. He wobbles a bit, but manages to stand straight. “I am sure I can find my sister-.”

“It would be unwise to leave now,” Thor says, and he follows Steven. He’s taller than Steven, but he tries to keep himself at a distance to not overwhelm him. “You are unwell.”

“I am fine,” Steven says with gritted teeth as his nostril betrays him and blood trickles down to his lip. “Please. I don’t want to be anymore trouble to you.” 

“Then you will not leave,” Thor says and the falcons on the balcony caw in response. Freya goes to them without another word. “She has a soul forge. One that can do miracles for the infirmed. Please allow her to try.”

“You’ve already tried your forge on me.” Steven limps to the bed. He picks up the few possessions they found in his tattered clothes. A small cross, a tiny box with what looks like a jewel of some sort inside, and a piece of fabric. “I made the cross, do you know? I made it. My mother used to pray to a God. She was Catholic – I think that’s what they called it. I don’t remember as much anymore. But I remember her with these beads and a cross dangling from the end of them. So I made one to remember her by when Thanos condemned me to the Outriders’ barns. I gouged out the wood from the stall I slept in and twisted it to make the cross. It is all I have of her.”

“The jewel?” Thor asks quietly.

“Gamora gave it to me. Told me to keep it safe from my father.” He opens the box. It’s a yellow stone, glowing slightly. “It took all that I had to make sure he never found it, especially when he worked on me. It feels a little like I’m holding the souls of all in the palm of my hand.”

“Do you know what it is?”

“All I know is that it is a gift from my sister, and I would keep it safe for eternity. She wouldn’t tell me where she found it, or how it came into her possession.” Steven closes the box. He picks up the shred of fabric and stuffs it in his pocket. “Enough with the walk down memory lane. I need to leave.”

“Please.” Thor is not above begging the man. Yggdrasil found him worthy, Yggdrasil has some greater plan. 

Steven looks at Thor, his gaze strong, solemn, lost. “I don’t have a choice.” He goes to step around Thor and his leg gives out entirely. He tumbles to the floor before Thor can catch him. He curls in on himself, obviously holding back the scream trying to claw its way out of his throat. He groans instead.

“Freya! My lady Freya! Help!” Thor calls as he gathers Steven in his arms. 

Freya rushes to his side and after one glimpse of Steven’s pale and sweat soaked face says, “To my forge.”

Freya directs Thor to her special soul forge in her quarters. It is not in the underground but there are branches woven around the base of it, connecting it to the very earth some hundreds of feet below them. When Thor lays him down on the surface of Freya’s forge, Steven grits his teeth against the pain. For long years through his boyhood and youth, Steven learned to hold back the screams, to not allow the screeches of agony to be released. Thor knew this all from the data and information they’d taken from Thanos’ fortress. Freya is by Thor’s side, immediately activating the forge to scan Steven’s condition and give a status update. Her focus is intense, and Thor drops his gaze back down to Steven. 

A fine sheen of sweat covers his brow and he chews on his lips against the increasing pain. Freya has called some of her staff to assist her. A young Vaniri slips off the soft shoe Steven wears and carefully slits the trousers they’ve given him. When he reveals the leg, Thor closes his eyes.

“The infection is widespread. It isn’t like any infection I’ve seen before. I cannot find the source, only the body’s reaction. The inflammatory response is in overdrive. I am not be certain this is normal biological response for a Midgardian human,” Freya reports as she turns the holographic wheels and gears of the forge.

“I’m not a normal human,” Steven manages to say between gasps for breath. “Thanos stole a scientist from Earth to fix me. Erskine gave me a super serum and it changes things for me. I can’t get infections.”

Freya raises a brow at this statement but continues to work silently, her expression grave.

Thor stares at Steven as he holds back his reactions, as he stoically accepts the need to examine his inflamed leg. Thor shakes his head. “Do you have no happy memories? How do you go on? How do you continue?” He doesn’t mean to say it, but the words tumble out of him.

His words, though possibly harshly spoken, are responded to with a soft contemplative tone. “Yes. Many. I remember my mother and her faith. She would love to go to Christmas Eve mass at midnight when they would only light the church with candles. She would bring me even if I had a cough or my asthma was acting up.” The words settle the pain as he speaks. “I loved her gingerbread cookies. She would have to save up for the brown sugar for a few months especially if I was sick. But she made them every year for Christmas. One year she bought me my own drawing pencils. All the colors of the rainbow. I couldn’t tell which was which back then since I was color blind, but I saw the shades and I knew how long she must have saved for them. I loved them, I loved her.”

“You find some peace in your memories of her, even though you were robbed of her so young?” Thor asks. He shouldn’t tread on this ground; he feels it is a sacred and silent place.

Steven blinks too rapidly, but says, “Yes. That and my memories of being on Earth in the war. Thanos wanted to tesseract and I stopped him then. I had friends. I had hope. I thought I could save the world, and maybe even the universe. I hoped he’d never find me again.”

“You are a good man, Steven. Even if you think differently, you have tried to save us all with your sacrifice.”

“I did what anyone would do,” Steven whispers as the pain etches lines on his face again.

“You think too well of others,” Freya comments as she works.

Thor glances at her and then back at Steven. “You call Thanos your father sometimes, but deny he is that to you.”

“Yes,” Steven says and bites back at the pain. “He did horrible, unimaginable things to us. To my sisters and I. I cannot deny my sisters and they call him father. So I call him father to honor them. They are not his daughters. He raised us. He did this to me.” His words fade away as he closes his eyes. “You don’t know.”

Thor steps away from the forge for a moment, the memories of the data at the fore of his mind. All of what the Black Order did to him. He tastes bile again when he thinks about what Proxima Midnight did to the child, to the teen that grew up under her vile hands. How Ebony Maw used the child as a test subject, as if he was only an animal in a laboratory experiment. Thor has no strength to understand the evil in the universe.

“Come, Thor, you may want to see this,” Freya calls.

He takes a moment to compose himself but mustn’t do a good job since Freya gives him a half smile and a quirked brow before she draws his attention to the soul forge read out. “What he said is true. There is no infectious agent. The serum in his blood causes this issue. He needs proper care.”

“Can you help him?” Thor notices that Steven is alert and watching them.

“I’m afraid I may not be able to.” Freya points to the display. “He’s far from any Midgardian human. He’s been modified by the serum, yes, but also by Thanos. I am not an engineer and his mechanical parts needs someone who can understand Midgardian biochemistry and the engineered parts. I’m afraid I might cause further damage if I try to alleviate the pain. I may do him harm if I try to cure him and fix him.”

“Engineer? Biochemistry?” He shakes his head. “I need to get him to Midgard. Earth’s Mightiest Heroes may help him. There is one there that is a great engineer, and another who is known to have done biochemical experiments to alter his own biology. Perhaps they may help you?”

“If you go, I cannot go with you, Thor,” Freya says. “I gave you sanctuary. I cannot risk a war with Asgard. The Vanir are not prepared to take on Odin and his wrath. We did that ages ago when he brought his goddess of death with him.”

Thor furrows his brow at the last bit of information. He was never one to sit still in history class. He doesn’t know a goddess of death, but perhaps that is for another time to explore. “Well, I need to find a way off of Asgard and back to Earth without my father-.”

A loud groan interrupts him. Steven thrashes on the forge bed and then struggles to sit up even as Freya’s assistant tries to stop him. He grapples against hands on his chest and legs as he cries out. Pain streaks his face and he lashes out, fists clenched and muscles tense.

Thor yells, “Stop! Steven, what is it? What’s wrong?”

“Gah! God!” Steven throws himself off the forge and crawls along the floor of the room. His leg drags behind him. “No! No!” Some internal struggle throws him across the tile and then he’s on all fours, his artificial eye projecting an image.

“My brother.”

It’s the woman. It’s Nebula. 

Steven hits the side of his head to try and stop the transmission, but all it does is nearly toppled him. He has to remain on all fours and allow the message to play out.

“He’s coming. I don’t know how he figured it out, but he found our intranet and started to track it.” Her words are punctuated but also said quickly with fear and anger. “I managed to get out of the prison cell. I have the help of the trickster god once I overpowered the guards when I feigned illness. The trickster knows of a route off planet. Come quickly. We cannot delay. If he comes, all of Asgard will die. He comes with a new army. Not the Black Order, not the Outriders. He comes with Malekith and the Goddess of Death. They come to destroy Odin and Asgard. I am sending you the coordinates of our escape route. Please brother, do not delay. I have no love of this universe, or my life. But I would not live without you.”

The transmission ends and Steven falls to sit. He glares up at them, seething that they watched an apparently secret transmission between the siblings. Blood drips down his face from his nostril. He pants as he speaks, “Get us out of here. Send a message to your father to evacuate. There’s no time. Thanos will destroy everything you love.”

**Author's Note:**

> This is really only my second venture into Thundershield. I hope you like it so far. We will get to see SO much more of Thor next chapter. I hope you liked it so far!
> 
> I think it is important to tell you that I am researching a lot of Norse Mythology for this fic. It is not solely based on Marvel's interpretation. For references: [Norse Mythology for Smart People](https://norse-mythology.org) and Neil Gaimen's Norse Mythology. Plus odds and ends off the internet (mostly Wikipedia)
> 
> PS I was so excited to see the first kudo and then the second. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I'm new to the pairing and I want to send you all my appreciation and love!!
> 
> Also just a quick thank you again. I haven’t gotten to all of the comments. But I appreciate you. All of you reading this story.


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